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Introduction
Youth crime has declined in most developed countries since the 1990s (Farrell et al., 2014; McAra and McVie, 2019). It has been theorised that youth offending has dropped due to increased surveillance resulting in less opportunity for crime to occur (Farrell et al., 2015), and early intervention efforts to disrupt or redirect youth from traditional crime (Griffiths and Norris, 2020; Svensson and Oberwittler, 2021). In addition, a decline in risk-taking behaviours such as substance use and physical fighting has been observed in multiple jurisdictions (Harding et al., 2016; Lewycka et al., 2018). However, it is of significance that the recent trend in youth crime is based on traditional crimes in the public domain. Within a similar timeframe, young people’s use of digital technologies has significantly expanded. Adolescent use of the internet ranges from 94% to 97% across the USA, UK, Europe and Australia, with initial mobile phone acquisition between ages 7 and 10 years (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2018; Australian Communications and Media Authority, 2020; Childwise, 2021; Rideout and Robb, 2019; Smahel et al., 2020). The reduction in traditional youth crime may, at face value, seem positive. But, when considered alongside the increase in youth technology usage across the same period, it raises the question of whether the reduction in youth crime is an actual decline in criminal and delinquent activity or whether a form of displacement has occurred. McAra and McVie (2019) raised the idea of a “displacement effect” where risky or harmful behaviour among youth may be migrating to landscapes with fewer capable guardians such as surveillance measures or traditional law enforcement monitoring. Miro-Llinares and Moneva (2019) discuss a shift in opportunities to offend driven by the evolution of technology, which may provide new and less visible areas in which to engage and, consequently, drive down traditional offending. This paper seeks to build upon the suggestion a displacement effect or shift is taking place by exploring whether youth crime is occurring digitally and is, therefore, less detectable through traditional reporting methods?
Background
While a decline in youth offending has been well documented (Birch and Sicard, 2020; Farrell et al., 2015), this analysis has largely overlooked the digital space. A gap in cybercrime metrics has also been acknowledged,...