Durante la pasada semana, la ciudad de Washington acogió la 41ª edición de la American Society of Criminology (ASC). Esta es una de las citas criminológicas más importantes de todo el año a nivel mundial, ya que reúne a una enorme cantidad de expertos en criminología, ciencias del crimen, juristas y otros profesionales relacionados con el ámbito de la seguridad, la criminalidad o la justicia penal o penitenciaria. Con más de una decena de áreas de interés criminológico, este encuentro se complementa con paneles, workshops y otras tareas del máximo interés.
Desde el centro Crímina para el estudio y prevención de la delincuencia, el Dr. Fernando Miró Llinares, director del centro y Zora Esteve, docente e investigadora de CRÍMINA, presentaron varias comunicaciones en las áreas de «Causes Of Crime and Criminal Behavior», «Types of Offending» y «Victimology», comunicaciones que os resumimos en este post.
The American Society of Criminology is an international organization whose members pursue scholarly, scientific, and professional knowledge concerning the measurement, etiology, consequences, prevention, control, and treatment of crime and delinquency.
The Society’s objectives are to encourage the exchange, in a multidisciplinary setting, of those engaged in research, teaching, and practice so as to foster criminological scholarship, and to serve as a forum for the dissemination of criminological knowledge. Our membership includes students, practitioners, and academicians from the many fields of criminal justice and criminology.
I Know Where you are. Hate Speech and DigiPlace
The development of web-based services that combine spatial coordinates and data allows us to geographically pinpoint and share on the Internet Twitter posts, photos, running routes, and even the location of suspicious individuals or where someone has been the victim of a crime, thus creating a mix of virtuality and reality that connects cyberspace to physical space and constructing what Zook and Graham (2007) have defined as “DigiPlace.” This environment offers opportunities for new research that establishes relationships not only between different socio-demographic variables with particular characteristics of crime events, but also with other spatial variables that expand the descriptive reach of research into a particular phenomenon. With this in mind, assuming that neither incitement to particular or general forms of violence nor hate speech are phenomena that originated with the birth or popularization of the Internet, we have undertaken a study that takes advantage of this hybrid space’s characteristics by first providing a spatial-temporal description of messages containing incitements to violence or hate speech on the Internet from a sample of geolocated tweets from Spain and then relating them to socio-demographic characteristics of the Spanish population for each zone of the country.
Ciberaprende (Cyberlearn): Intervening to Prevent Cybervictimization Among Adolescents
The objective of this research is to design an intervention program to reduce risky behaviors for social and economic cybervictimization of minor Internet users in Spain. Using results obtained in the CiberApp report carried out by the CRÍMINA Center which show the extent of cybercrime experienced by minors in Spain, we designed Ciberaprende (Cyberlearn), an intervention based on the ISI Model (Miró, 2011,2013,2014), which is based on the presentation of risks and threats that minors are exposed to through particular behaviors on the Internet and provides strategies that promote safe use of the web. After applying the program to 1,575 adolescents of both sexes between the ages of 14 and 18, the results showed a significant reduction in future intent to engage in behaviors that most often lead to cybervictimization among adolescents.
Why Does Formal Punishment not Appear Effective? Analysis of Predictors of Recidivism in Road Safety
The objective of this research is to analyze why traffic laws related to speed limits and drunk driving, with their respective sanctions, are not complied with by Spanish drivers and which factors determine compliance by recidivist drivers. To that end a survey has been designed to evaluate the frequency with which both laws are violated as well as other determinants of compliance, such as those associated with the Deterrence approach (real knowledge of the law, perceived certainty, and sanctions received in the past); the Social Influence approach (prescriptive norms and descriptive norms); and the Legitimacy approach (moral judgment, adaptation and valuing of the limits set by the law, and a sense of obligation to obey the law). After the survey was administered to a representative sample of Spanish drivers of both sexes, two regression models were constructed to analyze the weight of each of the evaluated factors to explain and predict compliance with or violation of the laws by recidivist drivers and thereby specify the determinants of traffic recidivism in order to develop effective prevention programs.
