Violent Crime and IT Technologies

Abstract

The article is devoted to the criminological study of quantitative and qualitative changes in criminal violence in modern Russia with due regard to the official statistical data collected by the Main Information and Analytical Center of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia for the period from 2012 to 2018 and modern processes in the social development. It examines the state and dynamics of crimes against the person including their most dangerous types (murders, intentional inflictions of serious harm to health, and rapes) as the basis of violent crime. The author determines the range of acts that can be committed using information and telecommunications networks, including the Internet, and evaluates the prospects for violent crimes committed by remote means. The paper proves that the related new trends of computerization, youthification, intellectualization and high level of natural latency, which were not previously characteristic of violent crime, can now be revealed. As the methodological basis of the research, the author relies on the fundamental laws of materialistic dialectics and the theory of cognition, general scientific philosophical approach to the study of social phenomena, logical, historical, system-structural and statistical, as well as concrete-sociological methods of research: document analysis and monitoring. In conclusion, the author substantiates the conclusion about inexhaustible relevance of the study of criminal violence caused by the non-ideal and contradictory nature of the man. The author considers as promising the development and application in legal science of the ideas of modern Russian philosophy concerning the need to analyze the results of progress, control over its course and consequences of introduction of high technologies. In order to solve the urgent theoretical and practical issues of combating “new” violent crime an integrative approach to definition of the methodology of criminological research that involves the development of existing problems at the intersection of the already established violensology and the current implications of the philosophy of criminological cyberology.