Coronavirus as a burning glass for digital risks?

Abstract

The digital space represents a global interaction and communication sphere for all people. In this sphere children connect with young people and adults across almost all countries, cultures and age groups. The constant improvement and implementation of automatic translation programs, for example in social media, also means that language barriers in the digital space are becoming increasingly blurred. This evolution, which is actually to be welcomed, promises at best the emergence of a kind of Internet-based global society, but it also presents a dark side. Criminology assumes that many forms of crime - regardless of the respective national criminal law - typically arise from interaction between people. There are few arguments to argue against the fact that this is not the case on the Internet - which actually makes it the first truly widespread and global crime scene in the world. Children, too, are a natural part of this educated global scene (or space) and are thus exposed to the digital forms of crime that go hand in hand with it. At the European level, children aged 9-16 spend an average of 167 minutes each day online (Smahel et al. 2019). In Germany alone, 97 percent of minors aged 12 and over use the Internet several times a week (Feierabend et al. 2020). Children are also intrinsically confronted with the digital risks of this area. These risks range from cybergrooming and sexual harassment in social media and online games, to the confrontation with extremism and violent content, to risks such as cyberbullying and stalking (cf. Bötticher 2020; Gabriel 2020; Rüdiger 2020). Almost 25 percent of children in the European Union who use the Internet have already reported having had at least one negative online experience in the past year (Smahel et al. 2019). The U-25 study from Germany even speaks of minors perceiving the Internet as a culture of injustice (Borchard et al. 2018).