Particular criminalistic aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The current study shows the results of the first research conducted by the COVID Working Group established at the National Institute of Criminology (OKRI/NIC) in Budapest, in September 2020. The examination was performed in the form of a desk-research on the criminological aspects of the COVID-epidemic, the results of which are presented in this situation-report. The recent report also serves as a draft for a comprehensive research planned for 2021. From the outcome of the analysis, it can be concluded undoubtedly that the COVID-pandemic has brought about certain structural changes on the society and new phenomena have also emerged in the field of crime. We could also experience these global tendencies in Hungary, too. Although in Hungary, unlike in some Western European countries, there were not any violent protest movements and the general number of violent acts seemed to decrease during the epidemic, new forms of hatred appeared. The citizens bought more weapons and there was a growth in domestic violence acts, too. The epidemic has strengthened communication in the online space and thus provided an opportunity for cybercrime and the related fraud and counterfeiting, while some old forms of fraud have also begun to spread offline. The Hungarian government considered it necessary to introduce special legal rules to protect the health of citizens and to prevent the dissemination of fake news. The study briefly presents these legal measures, too. The examination of the epidemic period until now allowed us only to discover some relevant phenomena but did not provide an opportunity to obtain interpretable statistical data. This will be the task of future researches.