Samenvatting

At the start of the corona pandemic, many speculated that opportunities for online crime would increase due to the drastic lockdown measures, especially for young people. In this article we explore whether this was the case and whether this was related to changes in young people's daily lives. Using Routine Activity Theory and the unstructured socializing perspective, we expected that offline delinquency would decrease and online delinquency would increase due to a decrease in offline and an increase in online activities and contacts. We used a unique longitudinal dataset with self-report data, collected from a high-risk group of young people (N=289; age 13-25 years) in ICT education (secondary school and MBO). Results show that activities and contacts with friends changed as expected. Young people indicated that, on average, offline contacts and activities decreased, while online contacts and activities increased. Nevertheless, across all forms of crime, delinquency rates for many young people remained stable. Changes that did occur generally showed a decrease in delinquency. This was true even for the different forms of online delinquency (both cyber-dependent crime and cyber-enabled crime). Multinomial models show that changes in delinquency are partially related to changes in activities and contact with friends, but not entirely as we had expected based on criminological theory. Finally, we discuss the lessons (theoretical implications and future research) that we as criminologists can learn from the natural experiment of the corona pandemic.