DigiKrim seeks to advance knowledge on how digital platforms shape juvenile crime, identify key trends and emerging patterns, and provide evidence-based recommendations for crime prevention, policing, and cross-sector collaboration in Norwegian cities. Data collection is conducted in Stavanger, Oslo, Bærum, Bergen, Drammen, and Kristiansand, with supplementary data collection in Sweden. The project employs a mixed-methods design and draws on multiple complementary data sources.
Data collection includes:
- Literature and document reviews to map existing knowledge on digital crime and the recruitment of children and adolescents into criminal activity.
- Analysis of register data to provide a national overview of the prevalence and development of registered juvenile crime over the past 20 years. The analyses will also examine different age groups and birth cohorts across Norwegian cities to identify similarities and differences in key developmental trends between municipalities.
- Qualitative interviews with a broad range of stakeholders, including police officers, prosecutors, crime prevention units, criminal investigators from different police districts, municipal services, other public and private prevention actors, and children and young people with experience of offending.
The analyses will be thematic and mechanism-oriented. Particular emphasis will be placed on identifying the mechanisms that contribute to digital exposure, recruitment, and involvement in crime among children and adolescents, and on understanding how these mechanisms vary across different contexts and groups. The analyses focus on four key dimensions:
- Risk environments: Types of digital platforms (including open platforms such as social media and gaming platforms, as well as closed platforms such as encrypted messaging services), together with the push and pull factors associated with criminal involvement.
- Recruitment: How young people are recruited into crime (through both digital and physical channels), extortion and other recruitment mechanisms, the influence of role models and online influencers promoting criminal lifestyles, and the role of social factors such as trust and perceived risk.
- Organization: Digital and hybrid criminal networks, coordination of criminal activities, and transnational forms of collaboration.
- Offending: The relationship between digitally facilitated planning and the commission of crimes in the physical world.
