标题：Proposing the Crime Substitution Hypothesis: Exploring the possible causal relationship between excessive adolescent video game playing, social networking and crime reduction.
摘要：O n Sunday February 9, 1964, The Beatles made their debut on US television. Their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show drew an estimated audience of 73 million people. One of the most quoted consequences associated with this particular show was that between 8pm and 9pm when the show was aired, a number of news reports claimed (without any supporting evidence and so almost certainly fallaciously) that there was no reported incidence of juvenile crime across America during the time of the broadcast. Moreover, the editor of Newsweek, B.F. Henry, went as far as to claim that "there wasn't so much as a hubcap stolen" during the hour that The Beatles were on the show (Bell, 2011). This apocryphal tale, at the very least, shows the apparent compelling logic in the argument that when an activity is so engrossing it has the capacity to stop people engaging in other types of activity such as crime. Inspired by a speculative blog post on the topic (Sutton, 2010) and supported by some very recent research by Cashmore (2012), which failed to disconfirm what we refer to in this paper as the Crime Substitution Hypothesis, this article briefly examines the extent to which popular youth activity (namely video gaming and social networking) may be having an effect on youth offending and victimization.
