Cybercrime and Digital Deviance

by Roderick Graham, 'Shawn K. Smith

Cybercrime and Digital Deviance is a work that combines insights from sociology, criminology, and computer science to explore cybercrimes such as hacking and romance scams, along with forms of cyberdeviance such as pornography addiction, trolling, and flaming. Other issues are explored including cybercrime investigations, organized cybercrime, the use of algorithms in policing, cybervictimization, and the theories used to explain cybercrime. Graham and Smith make a conceptual distinction between a terrestrial, physical environment and a single digital environment produced through networked computers. Conceptualizing the online space as a distinct environment for social interaction links this text with assumptions made in the fields of urban sociology or rural criminology. Students in sociology and criminology will have a familiar entry point for understanding what may appear to be a technologically complex course of study. The authors organize all forms of cybercrime and cyberdeviance by applying a typology developed by David cybertrespass, cyberdeception, cyberviolence, and cyberpornography. This typology is simple enough for students just beginning their inquiry into cybercrime. Because it is based on legal categories of trespassing, fraud, violent crimes against persons, and moral transgressions it provides a solid foundation for deeper study. Taken together, Graham and Smith’s application of a digital environment and Wall’s cybercrime typology makes this an ideal upper level text for students in sociology and criminal justice. It is also an ideal introductory text for students within the emerging disciplines of cybercrime and cybersecurity.

222 pages, Paperback

Published September 25, 2019

About the author

Edinburgh-born Roderick Graham was educated at the Royal High School of Edinburgh and the University of Edinburgh before serving with the Royal Army Education Corps as staff officer for education at the East Africa Command.

On leaving the army, he went on to pursue a long and varied career in television and radio as a writer, freelance director and producer. He produced the double Emmy award-winner Elizabeth R in 1971, and from 1974 to 1977 he was the producer of fifty-four episodes of the long-running BBC police series Z Cars. He was appointed head of drama at BBC TV Scotland and produced and directed A Scots Quair, Boswell for the Defence and Sutherland’s Law among many others. He eventually returned to freelance directing and worked on the well-known TV series Juliet Bravo, One by One and All Creatures Great and Small. He also wrote and directed two series of children’s archaeology for BBC TV, seven radio plays and one four-part radio biography of Sidney Smith.

Roderick Graham has also taught writing and directing at Napier and Leeds Metropolitan Universities, Edinburgh College of Art and the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. He is the author of the critically acclaimed John Knox: Democrat (Hale, 2001) and The Great Infidel: A Life of David Hume (Tuckwell Press, 2004, paperback edition by Birlinn, 2005). In 2007 Birlinn published An Accidental Tragedy: The Life of Mary, Queen of Scots. In this readable and insightful biography, Roderick Graham challenges many of the traditionally held perceptions of the Scottish queen, and examines her roles as a woman, a politician and a monarch.

Roderick Graham now lives in Edinburgh.