Dot.cons

Yvonne Jewkes

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781843920014
• eBook ISBN: 9781135992026
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Cyberspace opens up infinitely new possibilities to the deviant imagination. With access to the Internet and sufficient know-how you can, if you are so inclined, buy a bride, cruise gay bars, go on a global shopping spree with someone else's credit card, break into a bank's security system, plan a demonstration in another country and hack into the Pentagon ? all on the same day. In more than any other medium, time and place are transcended, undermining the traditional relationship between physical context and social situation.

This book crosses the boundaries of sociological, criminological and cultural discourse in order to explore the implications of these massive transformations in information and communication technologies for the growth of criminal and deviant identities and behaviour on the Internet. This is a book not about computers, nor about legal controversies over the regulation of cyberspace, but about people and the new patterns of human identity, behaviour and association that are emerging as a result of the communications revolution.

Chapter 1

Crime, deviance and the disembodied self: transcending the dangers of corporeality

Yvonne Jewkes and Keith Sharp

This is how it works. The thief gets hold of the three pieces of information that are needed to create an identity. In the US, these are: your social security number, your date of birth and your driving licence number. This information is all…on the Net [for] around $50…You, of course, have an excellent credit record which is available over the Net for $8.50…Pretending to be your landlord or employer, I do the research. Given your financial good conduct, you are ‘pre-approved’ for card, phone and hire-purchase accounts. I apply for gold and platinum in your name, supplying your details, but indicating a change of address for billing…Spending fast, I max out the cards, ignore the monthly bills and apply for more cards…I fall behind on the rent. To forestall eviction and car repossession, I file for bankruptcy – under your name. Given the law's delays, I can expect two years of dolce vita before moving on (the world is full of identities). You, meanwhile, know nothing of this until – several months later – debt collection agencies begin to harass you. Life becomes Kafkaesque. You inform the police – but they can't see that you are the victim of any crime…You have to prove you're you…Your credit rating is shot – probably forever. You now know what it means to be an untouchable.

(Sutherland 2000: unpaginated)

In an enduring ritual of nightly ‘cruising’, a crowd of people has gathered in a lonely-hearts club. A man musters up the courage to approach a woman and fires off a few of his best one-liners. She takes the bait and tugs the line with some sexy retorts of her own. The chemistry is right; things heat up. They are soon jarred back to reality by the teasing of those around them who've caught on to their little game. Embarrassed, they quickly pass notes and plan a late-night rendezvous. Both show up punctually at the private place they have chosen. An awkward silence is broken by more provocative flirting, and then, finally, what they've both come for: sex. They quickly undress one another and begin making frantic love. The exchange is short but intense. When they've finished, they swap a few nervous pleasantries. As each of them chooses ‘Quit’ from a menu of options on a computer screen, a cheap digitized voice says ‘good-bye’. The telephone link between their computers is disconnected. Tonight's disembodied tryst has cost each about six dollars.

(Branwyn 2000: 396)

Identities and the Internet

Cyberspace opens up infinitely new possibilities to the deviant imagination. With the right equipment and sufficient technical know-how you can – if you are so inclined – buy a bride, cruise gay bars, go on a global shopping spree with someone else's credit card, break into a bank's security system, plan a demonstration in another country and hack into the Pentagon – all on the same day. More than any other medium, computer-mediated communications (CMCs) undermine the traditional relationship between physical context and social situation. Place and time are transcended. When we sit down at our computers and sign on to the Internet we are no longer ‘in’ our physical setting but are relocated to a ‘generalised elsewhere’ of distant places and ‘non-local’ people (Morley and Robins 1995: 132; see also Meyrowitz 1985, 1989). Anonymity, disembodiment, outreach and speed are the hallmarks of Internet communication and, combined, they can make us feel daring, liberated, infallible.

Contemporary life has been described as a world of spectacle, narcissism and performance (Abercrombie and Longhurst 1998). The Internet creates spaces for all three, providing us with the opportunity both to present ourselves and to invent ourselves. Discourses about identity are a major currency of contemporary culture but in postmodern analyses identity is not inherent or ‘fixed’ (for example by biological or psychological predispositions). Identity is multidimensional and amorphous; we can be whoever, whatever, wherever we wish to be. And the Internet is the postmodern medium par excellence; the slate upon which we can write and rewrite our personalities in a perpetual act of self-creation. Whether choosing a nickname or email address, constructing a home page, entering a chat room, leaving our autobiographical details on sites that connect people in new friendships or rekindle old relationships, or engaging in the kinds of activities highlighted in the quotations above, the Net provides a locus for creative authorship of the self. These activities might be spectacular, performative, narcissistic or all three, but they are, in the main, harmless and often humorous vehicles for self-presentation. At worst, the personal details that we present on home pages, on sites such as Friends Reunited, or to potential sexual partners in cyberspace, are conspicuous self-promotions; ‘a fanclub to oneself’ (Di Giovanna 1996). But because the Internet provides more opportunities for ‘embodiment’ than for physical interaction – in other words, the channel of communication is limited so that aspects of the embodied self can only be apparent if truthfully described by the sender (Miller 1995) – it can liberate its users from the usual constraints of corporeality. The Internet thus gives users a freedom of expression – a freedom of being – quite unlike anything they have at their disposal in the physical world. As Sherry Turkle (1995: 12) notes, cyberspace makes possible the creation of an identity ‘so fluid and multiple that it strains the very limits of the notion’. Equally, it affords users the potential to conceal stigmatised aspects of their ‘real life’ identities while simultaneously facilitating the establishment of identities that are fantastic, fraudulent, exploitative or criminal.

But although the Internet facilitates multiple identities and apparently limitless freedoms of choice, expression and agency, at the same time it magnifies many existing inequalities split along racial, gendered and economic lines.¹ The subject of gender has dominated sociological discussions of the relationship between computer-mediated communications and their users. After 30 years when the dominant image of the Internet user was of a (white, university-educated) man, there has been a sustained attempt in the last ten years to reposition the Internet as a feminine – and feminist – technology. Some feminist writers have described cyberspace as a feminine space, a maternal matrix, a womb-like place (Smelik 2000; see also Taylor, Chapter 8 of this volume). But claims that the Internet is a masculine technology are hard to dispute given that the vast majority of those involved in the design, development and production of CMCs are male and that there remains a cultural dominance of masculinity in newsgroups, discussion lists and most other online spaces. Furthermore, the practices being facilitated by the Net that are described in this book – child pornography, prostitution, stalking, sexual harassment, human trafficking, hacking, etc. – are without doubt predominantly (although not exclusively) the activities of men, and the victims are more often than not women and girls. At the same time, the sexist and oppressive structural, social-psychological and cultural factors that have traditionally impeded women's relationship with information and communication technologies have been slow to break down and arguably have not changed dramatically yet (van Zoonen 2002).

Yet, as some of the chapters that follow will argue, the simplistic positioning of men as oppressors and women as victims is systematically problematised in cyberspace. Cyber-feminists have made much of the Internet's capacity to provide women with a network on which they can ‘chatter, natter, work and play…a new tactile environment in which women artists can find their space’ (Plant 2000: 325), but van Zoonen (2002: 12) goes further, suggesting that in cyberspace:

There seems…as much evidence for the claim that the Internet is masculine and a male world, as there is for the claim that it is feminine and a female world. There is yet another claim to the gender of the Internet, and that is that it has no gender, or better that it is a gender laboratory, a playground for experimenting with gender symbols and identity, a space to escape from the dichotomy of gender and the boundaries produced by physical bodies.

Cyberspace thus allows participants to be multi-gendered, gender ambiguous or gender free. The notion that in virtual reality gender can be multidimensional, non-existent or irrelevant highlights the danger of making generalised or essentialist claims for the Internet being either a woman's medium or a man's. None the less, given that socio-cultural, moral and technological constraints tend to bind women more restrictively than men, it is interesting to note how women are utilising computer-mediated communications to transgress conventional expectations of ‘acceptable’ femininity and assert their agency in ways which, in ‘normal’ life, would submit them to accusations of deviance, depravity and perhaps worse. As Sadie Plant (2000: 325) puts it: ‘there is more to cyberspace than meets the male gaze…women are accessing the circuits on which they were once exchanged, hacking into security's controls and discovering their own post-humanity.’

The ‘democratic’ vs. the ‘perverting’ role of the Internet: women's use of online pornography

A good example of the subversion of traditional gendered roles is women's consumption of online pornography. John Naughton (1999: 34–35) sums up the appeal of Internet porn to a general audience, but his comments arguably alert us to the particular attraction of such material to the female consumer:

What makes the Net unusual is that it is the first conduit for illicit or disreputable publications which does not require the consumer to cross a shame threshold. If you want to buy a raunchy magazine or a smutty video, you have to run some risks of exposure or embarrassment. You may have to visit a sex-shop, for example, and be seen emerging from the premises by a colleague; or receive a parcel in the mail that could be opened in error by someone in your family or office; or undergo the humiliation of having to ask the newsagent to take down a particular magazine from the top rack.

This quotation illustrates the way in which the emergence of the Internet articulates with familiar debates around freedom, access and censorship. At one extreme it is possible to argue that in making pornography widely available, an important democratic end has been served. The same point would apply to any material to which access has traditionally been limited, either explicitly or de facto, to certain social groups: the fact that anyone with a computer can, if they choose, view the material, means that no group is excluded from whatever benefits or perils such viewing brings. If the traditional organisation of the pornography industry has indeed meant that women have effectively been excluded as consumers, and as a result of this, pornography has been allowed to develop in ways that fulfil essentially patriarchal ends, then it would seem to follow that technologies which allow women to be equal consumers with men must be both democratic and socially desirable. Just as opening up higher education to women was surely a prerequisite for the challenges to patriarchal knowledge which followed, so the emergence of Internet pornography could be seen as a prerequisite for the emergence of an inclusive erotica, in which women's libidinal interests are represented, equally, alongside those of men.

Alternatively, it is possible to regard the expansion of access to pornographic material in exactly the opposite way, as a dangerously unblockable conduit through which fundamentally harmful images can be transmitted to an exponentially growing population of Internet subscribers. The argument would run like this: pornography is harmful and degrading to whosoever views it. It is, moreover, harmful to society in exact proportion with which it is viewed by society's members. It follows, therefore, that any technology which increases the volume of pornography viewed in society is a bad thing and should be discouraged.

This conflict mirrors the polarisation of views among earlier generations of writers on the social consequences of the mass media who argued, at one extreme, that media representations merely reflect audience views (an argument usually put forward most vigorously by media producers) and, at the other, that they are – cynically or not – involved in shaping and determining those views (Wright Mills 1956). So in one sense, the availability of material on the Internet, which promotes (intentionally or not) deviant or criminal activity, does not pose a qualitatively different problem for analysts than that posed by more traditional media. There are, however, a number of important differences between the Internet and traditional media which, at the very least, make this problem more pressing.

First, the Internet is virtually impossible to censor. While for those of a libertarian persuasion this is undoubtedly one of its greatest attractions, if we are to endorse one or other version of the view that people and societies can be harmed by having access to certain material, we must conclude that the potential for harm, at least, is increased by the existence of the Internet. Secondly, the Internet has the capacity to be interactive, in ways that traditional media are not. The distinction between the producer and consumer is blurred, such that the consumers of one moment become the producers of the next and vice versa. This could be further evidence of its essentially democratic nature – control over content no longer rests with one, powerful, interest group, but potentially with each and every individual user. Equally, the scope for subversion and, ultimately, anarchy could be considerable. Thirdly, and related to this, the boundaries between mass and individual communication are blurred. Individuals can make themselves and their messages available to a mass audience, just as readily as they can to individuals. No longer does access to a mass audience require the resources and power of the very few; a PC, a modem and a telephone line is all that is required. Taken individually these differences are significant; taken collectively, and in the context of debates about the democratic versus perverting role of the Internet in society, they are monumental.

It is this dichotomy – the democratic versus the perverting role of the Internet – that lies at the heart of discussions about its impact on crime and deviance. There can be little doubt that the Internet facilitates participation in previously inaccessible realms of knowledge and experience. But equally incontrovertible, as the chapters that follow will show, is the fact that the Internet has a dark underbelly. As the Guardian recently reminded us:

Almost every time another social tragedy comes to light now, it seems to have been Internet-assisted: from selling babies like commodities (the Internet twins), to fascism (Nazi memorabilia for sale on Yahoo!), and most disturbingly, paedophilia (Wonderland and Operation Magenta). The news stories invariably lead some people to blame the Internet as a haven for vice, abuse and illegal activity…[and] they may be right.

(Left 2002: unpaginated)

And if this were not sufficient to fuel a moral panic, the The Observer adopts an even more hysterical tone, claiming that the dark side of the web includes ‘pornography, paedophilia, murder, snuff movies and drug-dealing’ including a site that ‘allows you to arrange your own death by fatal injection activated by your computer’ and one which takes orders to ‘execute homeless children in South America and then promises to send a video of the murder’ (Kemp 1999: unpaginated). Of course, there is nothing inherently sinister in the technology itself. Most cybercrimes are reasonably common offences; computer technologies have simply provided a new means to commit ‘old’ crimes, and it is clearly not the case that if the Internet did not exist, nor would paedophilia, pornography and other offensive material, although it has undeniably increased the visibility of human depravity and suffering (Slevin 2000). Furthermore, much of the debate about Internet regulation and censorship appears to be based on speculative notions of the anti-social and harmful impacts it may have at some point in the future. An indication of the level of hysteria that surrounds the Internet is the finding that of over 90,000 newsgroups in the UK, only about 60 – less than one-tenth of 1 per cent – are of concern to the industry's ‘watchdog’, the Internet Watch Foundation (Left 2002: unpaginated).

Another important point, illustrated by the aforementioned example of women's use of online pornography, is that the Internet has problematised traditional notions of what constitutes acceptable and deviant behaviour. Becker's (1963) view that deviance is in the eye of the beholder has rarely seemed so apt, and its contested nature is illustrated in numerous ways in this volume. Women's consumption of Internet pornography also illustrates three further themes that have already been touched on but are worth reiterating as they run throughout this collection and provide a unifying motif. First, it demonstrates that the social meanings of the Internet emerge from particular contexts and practices of usage. Specifically, women's use of the Net to explore and satisfy various aspects of their sexual identities serves to highlight the slightly paradoxical fashion in which the technology impacts upon gender and, simultaneously, is itself shaped by gendered usage. In a broader context, it might be said that that online pornography was the very thing that propelled the rapid growth of the Internet and demonstrated its commercial potential (Di Filipo 2000; Wall 2001). Another important theme which, in some of the chapters that follow, is inextricably linked to the mutual shaping of the Internet and gender, is the notion that in cyberspace identity is not fixed but is an ephemeral, fluid entity, open to constant negotiation, change and manipulation. In the case of women's consumption of online pornography this disentanglement from the body allows the self to break free from the usual constraints of corporeality which, in the physical world, may prevent individuals from displaying aspects of their identities that would be discredited or disapproved of by others. This may be regarded as a positive characteristic of cyberspace: it liberates people from the shackles that bind them in the physical world. But when it comes to constructing identity, the line is increasingly blurred between ‘playful’ and fraudulent, inclusive and exploitative, accessible and extremist, ‘deviant’ and criminal. This leads us to the final theme that arises throughout this collection, which is the conclusion that the Internet's capacity to sustain multiple, anonymous, complex and contested identities – essential to the virtual sex-trade but equally important to all the other cybercrimes and deviant activities described in this book – clearly poses problems for would-be regulators of the Internet. Just as it might be said that pornography got people interested in the Net which, in turn, drove the development of the technology to deliver pornography a...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the authors
• 1 Crime, deviance and the disembodied self: transcending the dangers of corporeality
• 2 Policing the Net: crime, regulation and surveillance in cyberspace
• 3 Cyberpunters and cyberwhores: prostitution on the Internet
• 4 The electronic cloak: secret sexual deviance in cybersociety
• 5 Cyber-chattels: buying brides and babies on the Net
• 6 What a tangled web we weave: identity theft and the Internet
• 7 Cyberstalking: an international perspective
• 8 Maestros or misogynists? Gender and the social construction of hacking
• 9 Digital counter-cultures and the nature of electronic social and political movements
• 10 Investigating cybersociety: a consideration of the ethical and practical issues surrounding online research in chat rooms
• References
• Index