Rethinking Cybercrime: Critical Debates

Crime, Deviance and the Digital Turn

Digital technologies have changed not only how offences are committed but how criminologists think about crime, harm, identity, and justice. Rethinking Cybercrime: Critical Debates responds to that shift with an edited collection that treats cybercrime as a serious theoretical and interdisciplinary problem rather than a narrow technical concern.

An Edited Collection from the UCLan Cybercrime Research Unit

Edited by Tim Owen and Jessica Marshall, the volume brings together work developed through the University of Central Lancashire’s Cybercrime Research Unit and two international conferences held in 2016 and 2017. The result is a book that places criminological theory, law, sociology, philosophy, policing, and computing into conversation with one another.

What the Book Explores

The collection is divided into two parts. The first, Theoretical Explanations, gathers seven chapters that reconsider familiar debates and propose new ways forward. Across the volume, contributors examine:

• cyber terrorism and the challenge of defining and predicting politically motivated digital violence
• online grooming, child safety, and the darker possible uses of Vygotskian ideas about learning and scaffolding
• the criminalisation of tools under the Computer Misuse Act 1990 and the tensions this creates for security research and journalism
• the history, tactics, and transformations of hacktivism as political expression
• linguistic analysis and the assumption of identity online

Theoretical Debates, Real-World Consequences

What unites these chapters is a willingness to question inherited assumptions. The authors do not treat cybercrime as a single phenomenon; they ask how law, technology, politics, and social theory interact when offences, evidence, and identities cross digital platforms. For readers in criminology, law, sociology, policing, forensic science, and computing, the book offers a wide-angle view of where the academic debate stands and where it might go next.

Who This Collection Is For

This is a scholarly edited volume, best suited to students, researchers, lecturers, and practitioners who want critical analysis rather than a how-to cybersecurity guide. It may also appeal to readers interested in the social and legal dimensions of hacking, online abuse, cyber terrorism, and digital identity.

Why These Debates Still Matter

As online spaces continue to shape crime and criminal justice, the questions raised here remain urgent. Rethinking Cybercrime offers a grounded, interdisciplinary starting point for anyone who wants to think more carefully about crime in cyberspace, and about the theories we use to explain it.