摘要：T he overall drop in crime has been described as the most important criminological phenom- enon of modern times (McKnight, 2015). Street crime has roughly halved in Europe (including the UK), North America, and Australia since the early 1990s (Farrell, 2013). In a previous issue of Education and Health, we put forward the 'Crime Substitution Hypothesis' as one possible explanation (or at the very least a contributory factor) for the crime drop in Westernised industrialised countries over the past two decades (Griffiths & Sutton, 2013). More specifically, reflecting upon our own observations of young people's behaviour, and building upon the work of others who have speculated that Internet technology may help reduce crime (e.g., Katz, 2010; Sutton 2010; Zoss, 2010), we hypothesised more formally
