Cyber-Victimization Trends in Trinidad & Tobago: the Results of an Empirical Research

---

作者

Troy Smith¹ , NIkolaos Stamatakis²

1. Institute of Criminology and Public Safety
2. United Arab Emirates University

会议/活动

The University of Trinidad and Tobago 3rd Research Symposium (2021), August 2021 (虚拟会议)

海报摘要

In this, study we used the Routine Activity Theory (RAT) to examine online-related activities that affect cybercrime victimization in the Caribbean country of Trinidad and Tobago. First, we developed predictive models of operational risk of cybercrime victimization (unauthorized access and cyberbullying) using supervised learning methods, i.e., random forest and logistic regression, using survey data on online exposure, target suitability and capable guardianship collected from university students through an online self-administered survey. We found that that online activities that increase target exposure and accessibility increased victimization risk while physical methods of guardianship can be weakly protective. Further, the RAT was found to be better able to explain cyberbullying than unauthorized access victimization. The observed risk factors for Trinidad and Tobago were significantly similar to the outcomes of North American and European studies.

关键词

Cybercrime, Victimization, Routine activities theory, Trinidad and Tobago, Risk models, Random forest

研究领域

Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Law, Humanities and Social Sciences

参考文献

1. Cohen, L., & Felson, M. (1979). Social Change and Crime Rate Trends: A Routine Activity Approach. American Sociological Review, 44(4), 588–608.
2. Kosinski, M., Matz, S., Gosling, S., Popov, V., & Stillwell, D. (2016). Facebook as a Research Tool: A Look at How to Recruit Participants Using. Facebook and the Ethical Concerns That Come With Social Media Research.
3. Kshetri, N. (2013). Cybercrime and Cybersecurity in Latin American and Caribbean Economies. In Cybercrime and Cybersecurity in the Global South. Palgrave Macmillan.
4. Leukfeldt, E., & Yar, M. (2016). Applying Routine Activity Theory to Cybercrime: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis. Deviant Behavior, 37(3), 263–280
5. Reyns, B., Fisher, B., Bossler, A., & Holt, T. (2018). Opportunity and Self-Control: Do they Predict Multiple Forms of Online Victimization?
6. Samuels, D., & Zucco, C. (2013). Using Facebook as a Subject Recruitment Tool for Survey-Experimental Research. SSRN Electronic Journal.
7. Smith, T., & Stamatakis, N. (2021). Cyber-victimization Trends in Trinidad & Tobago: The Results of An Empirical Research. The International Journal of Cybersecurity Intelligence and Cybercrime, 4(1), 46–63. https://doi.org/10.52306/04010421JINE3509
8. Smith, T., & Stamatakis, N. (2020). Defining Cybercrime in Terms of Routine Activity and Spatial Distribution: Issues and Concerns. International of Cyber Criminology, 14(2), 433–459. https://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4769989
9. Zhu, L., Qiu, D., Ergu, D., Ying, C., & Liu, K. (2019). A study on predicting local default based on the random forest algorithm. Procedia Computer Science, 162.

基金

暂无数据

补充材料

暂无数据

附加信息

利益冲突

No competing interests were disclosed.

数据可用性声明

The datasets generated during and / or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

知识共享许可协议

Copyright © 2022 Smith et al. This is an open access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.