Youth Crime & 'Crimefluencing': Clicks, Clout & Coercion
5/19/202631 min
Crimes for clicks, shares and online status - In this episode, Tim and Xanthe unpack the dangerous new phenomenon “crimefluencing”. Australia’s top cop recently highlighted this “new and disturbing front in traditional gender-based violence” - with young people being drawn into online networks that encourage everything from petty offending to serious violence and exploitation. From livestreamed assaults to the coercion of vulnerable teenage girls, this episode explores how social media has gamified criminal behaviour.
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First 90 secondsXanthe Weston· Host0:00
[upbeat music] Hi, welcome to this week's episode of Motive & Method. I'm Dr. Xanthe Weston, forensic scientist and criminologist.
Tim Watson-Munro· Host0:12
And I'm criminal psychologist Tim Watson-Munro. This week we're not going to be talking about one specific case, but rather a very concerning trend.
Xanthe Weston· Host0:23
Hmm. We've all been hearing and seeing more and more reporting around youth crime in the past few years, but recently a disturbing new online phenomenon has emerged and it's been dubbed crimefluencing.
Tim Watson-Munro· Host0:35
What we're seeing is that crimes are now being performed for an audience, gamified in a sense, and shared for status online. It is something we've been discussing a lot in our professional lives, Xanthe, isn't it?
Xanthe Weston· Host0:48
It's, it certainly is. And these so-called crimefluencer networks are, are targeting specifically young people, particularly young girls, and they're being pressured into doing everything from pretty, pretty minor offenses through to quite serious crimes, all for clout online, and some of it is frankly shocking. Now, I came across the term crimefluencing really recently, and it was because I was doing, um, an interview actually for all of these crimes that are going on down in Melbourne. A few weeks ago now, um, some young people were allegedly caught having stolen cars, and somebody was run off a pushbike,