Chances

If you look at this issue, you actually have to question how crime prevention works, especially from the point of view of the security authorities. And there is a decisive factor here that we hardly ever discuss in the digital world. And everyone who watches this video will certainly have seen the police in the physical space. Imagine a world, a road traffic, where you never accidentally meet a police patrol or somehow see the police. You have this situation to some extent on the Internet. This means that this preventive function of the rule of law, which says: “Look, our rules apply here, we have our policemen outside, if something happens to you, you can talk to them” or also a perpetrator, who knows that the police are here, here you have to be careful. This preventive function, we don’t have it on the internet yet. Or have you ever seen a virtual police patrol by chance? The question of what this means is not yet sufficiently discussed. We must, however, discuss it, because it can lead to a feeling of injustice, of legal freedom, which has a massive impact on all issues. Why? There are criminological studies that say that you act, even as a perpetrator, when you expect low risks, when you are motivated to act, when there is a worthwhile goal. Low risks arise, for example, from the fact that you never see the police, that the probability of prosecution is low. Prevention on the Internet therefore, if we are honest, should be understood as transferring the preventive concepts that we know from physical space into digital space. And there the police is currently something that is still far too little discussed, what a preventive character the visibility of the police presence has. And nobody would doubt that we need a uniformed police force somehow in traffic or as a contact person. On the Internet, this discussion only exists at the very beginning, and I believe that this is an aspect that is certainly unusual, but that really needs to be discussed.

I actually see two major challenges: the first is that we have to seriously sit down and think about how children can participate in a protected way in a digital space that is globally oriented, that knows no physical boundaries, where people all over the world interact with children and that of course causes crime. How to find that and that requires a serious integrative strategy that goes beyond media literacy and also takes into account aspects such as security authorities, policing on the Internet and the responsibility of operators. I do not yet see this basic strategy. That is a task for me. And the second, which is of course also due to the profession, is that on the Internet the probability of a complaint for offenders is so low that it feeds the feeling of legal freedom on the Internet and children are let into a room where many people have the feeling that no rules apply here. The DIVSI U25 study, for example, refers to a culture of insult on the Internet, where many young people between the ages of 14 and 24 say that they are afraid to post anything, or that one must expect to be insulted and confronted with hatred.

I think we need to discuss: How can we increase this probability of notification, the visibility of the rule of law on the Internet? And there comes a point that is very important to me. This means the following: on the Internet we have a situation where crime is visible to everyone. Anyone who receives a phishing e-mail can be an attempted fraud. Every day they experience something like that. We do not know this from physical space. They see insults under some YouTube comments, which they don’t experience in any other way. When you’re out there, you don’t know what’s going on here. On the Internet you see all this. These so-called visible transgressions on the Internet lead to a lowering of the inhibition threshold of all people growing up in there.

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