Associate Professor Jeremy Prichard, Professor Richard Wortley, Professor Paul Watters, Dr Caroline Spiranovic, Dr Charlotte Hunn and Associate Professor Tony Krone were awarded the 2021 Adam Sutton Crime Prevention Award for the best publication or report in the area of crime prevention in 2020.
It’s a real joy to pen some reflections on the Adam Sutton Crime Prevention Award for our team’s paper ‘Effects of automated messages on internet users attempting to access “barely legal” pornography’. I don’t think any of us will ever forget this project. In a nutshell we wanted to conduct an online RCT with naïve participants who visited a fake ‘honeypot’ website and clicked on a fake link to barely legal pornography (which we used as a proxy for illegal content). The idea was to compare the reactions of experimental groups, who received different types of pop-up warnings, with a control group who did not.
It took 3 years to prepare the experiment – working closely with a commercial web-design company to design the ‘honeypot’ and other IT systems. We had close to 29,000 visitors to the website. Great … but waiting to see how many users clicked on the fake pornography link was agonising. There was a genuine risk that we’d never recruit an adequate sample size. Thankfully we got there, but it took 18 long months. Approaching the statistical analysis was honestly nerve wracking. Obviously our greatest fear was that the results would be a meaningless blancmange. This would mean 5 years of work and a lot of taxpayers’ money for naught. The moment we were certain that we had strong and meaningful results was just awesome.
I sometimes wonder if academia is a little too focussed on individual achievements. I hope we are not unwittingly mimicking some sort of competitive market paradigm. In any case, this study only succeeded because of years of kind-hearted cooperation between colleagues from very different disciplines and stages of their career. Thank you Caroline Spiranovic, Paul Watters, Tony Krone, Charlotte Hunn and Richard Wortley.
Provided by Associate Professor Jeremy Prichard on behalf on the team.