“Click this link to win 100,000$!”

Most of us have avoided dodgy links like this while online for fear of getting scammed. Just as the internet is becoming a more important part of our daily lives, cybercrime is also growing. This can have an impact on how we behave online, and hinder on our usage of technology.

Jelle Brands, an assistant professor at the Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology of Leiden, has recently turned an eye on this subject, along with other Fear of Crime researchers.

Fear of Crime sounds oddly specific, yet has now been its own field of research within criminology, that has been growing since the 1960’s, with some criminologists specializing in the field. Originally, researchers grew particularly interested in the subject when they noticed that despite decreasing crime rates, the average fear people had of being crime victims remained stable. This raised questions on what made people so afraid.

Fear

Since then, fear of crime has developed into a surprisingly useful area of research, that looks into factors that connect with higher or lower fear of crime (i.e., age, education level, sex, social class), as well as the behaviors that these fears can trigger. This then helps to understand how to reassure people and create a safer and environment for them. Recently, the question was raised of how these fears translate to online crimes.

An example is Brands first dive into fear of cybercrime last year, where he used surveys with Dutch people to find that fear of online financial crimes seems to correlate with people avoiding online banking and purchases altogether.

Brands explains that though fear sounds very negative at first glance, it can still be functional if proportional to the risk. It can lead people to avoid dodgy websites or incite them to take protective measures to make their experience online as safe as possible, like downloading a virus scanner. However, in the case of Brands study, people’s excessive fears did not lead them to protect themselves more, but simply to avoid going online.

Dysfunctional

This avoidance can be a great handicap for these people as it can limit the large-scale use of these platforms. This is what Fear of Crime experts call a dysfunctional fear, since the response that people are having is more extreme than what is needed from the situation, and impedes on their daily lives.

In a new paper this year, Brands collected all academic literature on the fears of cybercrime, to detect any trends and assessed that the subject is still scarce and disorganized and lacking standard questionnaires for each subject. Brands believes there are many topics worth researching in Fear of Cybercrime, beyond functional and dysfunctional fears, and that an organized common ground could help in exploring these topics.

Safer experience

For example, data shows women to be often more afraid of cybercrime than men. Brands explains that although this is also true of fear of offline crimes, it is mostly due to physical vulnerability of the victims in those situations, which is most often not the case when surfing online.

This means that there must be another explanation at play in those situations. Different cultures also have different levels of fear, and behave differently, with a paper showing South Koreans to be more anxious of getting hacked than Americans.

For Brands, addressing all these questions in a more structured manner could eventually lead us to a better understanding of which people are most afraid of the internet, what they fear, and how they react. This in turn will help us understand how to best reassure people, and enact policies and provide advice to make going online a safer experience for all.