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The article compares risk factors between threat victimization by digital and traditional modes (e.g. email or chat room versus letter or face-to-face). Until now, empirical tests of routine activity theory have applied a segregated approach in such cases, linking computer activities to cybercrime victimization and outdoor activities to traditional victimization. However, an integrated approach suggests that social interactions between people in the physical and digital world are connected. Thus, exposure to conflict-prone situations and eventual escalation of the conflict by a threat can occur in separate domains. Routine activities online can therefore result in traditional threat victimization and, conversely, outdoor activities can result in digital threat victimization. Results from victimization survey data from a sample of the Dutch general population (N = 6896) offer support for these hypotheses. The findings suggest that routine activity theory needs to be tested in new ways in contemporary digitalized societies.

Contrary to committing hacking offences, becoming a victim of hacking has received scant research attention. This article addresses risk factors for this type of crime and explores its theoretical and empirical connectedness to the more commonly studied type of cybercrime victimization: online harassment. The results show that low self-control acts as a general risk factor in two ways. First, it leads to a higher risk of experiencing either one of these two distinct types of victimization within a 1-year period. Second, cumulatively the experiences of being hacked and harassed are also more prominent among this group. However, specific online behaviors predicted specific online victimization types (e.g., using social media predicted only harassment and not hacking). The results thus shed more light on the extent to which criminological theories are applicable across different types of Internet-related crime.

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Changes in neighborhood status result primarily from the selective migration of income groups into and out of areas. These changes, in turn, are related to the chance of becoming the victim of a crime in a locality. Drawing on social disorganization theory, this study argues that victimization is more likely in disadvantaged neighborhoods as well as in neighborhoods where socioeconomic improvements are taking place. Gentrifying neighborhoods may suffer from social instability caused by the strong influx of new residents and from social heterogeneity, which is caused by the simultaneous presence of different income groups and, depending on local context, different ethnic groups. We test these hypotheses with Dutch victimization survey data among approximately 70,000 respondents, distributed across 2,500 neighborhoods within 500 municipalities in the Netherlands. The results show that, controlling for various individual, neighborhood, and city characteristics, intensive socioeconomic improvement of neighborhoods is related to higher victimization risk for theft, violence, and vandalism. In the Netherlands, high levels of residential instability in gentrifying areas are the mediating mechanism responsible for this relationship, while varying levels of ethnic and income heterogeneity are not. The results confirm that social disorganization is dependent not only upon the socioeconomic composition of neighborhoods, but also upon their socioeconomic dynamics.