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26 J. Forensic Psychiatry & Psych. 1 (2015)

handle is hein.journals/jnlofncpy26 and id is 1 raw text is: The Journal of Forensic Psychiatry & Psychology, 2015 1 Routledge Vol. 26, No. 1, 1-10, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14789949.2014.981562 * Taylor&Franci Group CASE REPORT Internet mediated crimes and theoretical approaches F. Carabellesea, C. Candellia*, C. Barbieri and R. Catanesia aSection of Criminology and Forensic Psychiatry, University of Bari, Italy; bSection of Forensic Science, University of Pavia, Italy (Received 12 February 2014; accepted 17 October 2014) Purpose: in the literature, the term 'Internet crime' has been coined to indicate the scenario in which a victim of homicide or other crimes is met through a chat room, and lured to death at the hands of the murderer. Various criticisms have been made of this new concept, on the grounds that the out- come is no different from that of other crimes committed without the use of Web resources, and so the method used has no particular influence. Indeed, it has been claimed that informatic crime just reflects a technological change in the nature of crime rather than a new form of criminal behavior attributable to the use of the Internet for criminal purposes. Method: our reflections were prompted by our experience as expert forensic psychiatry witnesses in three cases in which the aggressors had confessed to having had an exclusively virtual relationship with the victims, in which they spent a lot of time daily in a chat room. Conclusion: this scenario offers points for reflection on the nature of Web-mediated victim-aggressor interactions, to assess the effects on the planning and commission of the crime. Discussion. it's our opinion that there really is such a thing as Internet-correlated crime, because in this case the quality and quantity of the Internet interactions progressively altered the men's perception of the real relationship between themself and their victims. Keywords: forensic science; virtual identity; sexual crime; homicide; forensic psychiatric assessment; culpability Introduction A few of the recent cases of crimes committed using chat rooms, which we dealt with in our expertise as forensic psychiatrists (Catanesi, Carabellese, Candelli, Valerio, & Martinelli, 2009), gave us the opportunity to reflect on the possible role of the Web as a context in which antisocial behavior occurs. It is our opinion that, in addition to the many benefits related to ease of access and the ability to easily cover otherwise unbridgeable distances (Levy, 2008), there lies dark shadows of human communication. Of interest here, are specific potential routes of crime linked to the relations of the Web. The Web serves, in our opinion, to increase the likelihood of implementation of antisocial *Corresponding author. Email: chiara.candelli@uniba.it © 2014 Taylor & Francis

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