Digital Violence against Children: The Concept, Types and Qualifications

The work proposes a systematic analysis of modern forms of digital violence against children. Based on its typical parameters, the author identifies key trends in the development of digital violent influence on minors (exponential growth, expansion of the technological base, habitalization, high latency and commercialization, a combination of online and offline forms, organization). Based on several legal and criminological criteria, the author provides the typology of digital violence and assesses the consistency of the author’s concept in its comparison with the approaches of international organizations and national expert centers. Considerable attention is paid to the legal assessment of individual manifestations of digital violence against children (cyberbullying, stalking, doxing, fraping, heppislapping, digital sextortion, online grooming, revenge porn, flaming, zumbombing and digital rape). The author analyzes algorithms for their qualifications and determines the degree of adaptability of criminal law to modern digital challenges and threats. Based on the principles of functional equivalence, the author applies existing models of qualification of violent crimes to the peculiarities of committing digital attacks and dwells on possible directions for the development of criminal legislation and judicial practice. The quintessence of the work is the idea of the need and timeliness of developing a universal model of criminal law and criminological prevention of digital violence against children, which would simultaneously take into account both its general criminogenic factors and prerequisites (misuse of personal data, cyberattacks and data leaks, lack of foundations of digital hygiene), and the content features of certain types of digital violence.