Suleman I B R A H I M Lazarus - Profile on Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Peer-reviewed Papers by Suleman I B R A H I M Lazarus
Heliyon, 2022
This article is about the manifestations of similarities between two seemingly distinct groups of... more This article is about the manifestations of similarities between two seemingly distinct groups of Nigerians: cybercriminals and politicians. Which linguistic strategies do Twitter users use to express their opinions on cybercriminals and politicians? The study undertakes a qualitative analysis of 'engaged' tweets of an elite law enforcement agency in West Africa. We analyzed and coded over 100,000 'engaged' tweets based on a component of mechanisms of moral disengagement (i.e., advantageous comparison), a linguistic device. The results reveal how respondents defend the actions of online fraudsters ("the deviant group") by strategically comparing them to the wrongful acts of corrupt politicians ("the respectable group"). Similarly, the results show how respondents positioned this linguistic strategy to compare "the powerless group" (online fraudsters) and "the powerful group" (politicians) in society. Indeed, tweet responses suggest that the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) generally looks downwards for culprits (i.e., online fraudsters) while ignoring fraudulent politicians. We conclude that the process by which some actions are interpreted as a crime compared to others is a moral enterprise.
Tweets and reactions: revealing the geographies of cybercrime perpetrators and the north-south divide
Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 2022
How do tweets reflect the long-standing disparities between the northern and southern regions of ... more How do tweets reflect the long-standing disparities between the northern and southern regions of Nigeria? This study presents a qualitative analysis of Twitter users' responses (n = 101,518) to the tweets of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) regarding the production and prosecution of cybercrime. The article uses postcolonial perspectives to shed light on the legacies of British colonial efforts in Nigeria, such as the amalgamation of the northern and southern protectorates in 1914. The results revealed significant discrepancies between Nigeria's northern and southern regions regarding cybercriminal arrest, conviction, and sentencing. Specifically, the results showed that the EFCC's criminalization of Southerners differs substantially from that of Northerners. The contemporary manifestation of inequalities concerning the production and prosecution of cybercrime on Twitter reflects long-standing contestations (e.g., economic, political, cultural, geological) between the northern and southern parts of Nigerian society. Therefore, since the North-South divide in present-day Nigeria originated from British colonization, colonialism is the base that shaped the superstructure comprising political, religious, historical, geological (e.g., crude oil), and economic factors. In turn, the article spotlights that regional differences in educational attainment, originating from differing experiences of Christianization and colonization, interact with regional disparities in the production of cybercrime. More research is required to better understand how these contextual disparities in society interact with the production and prosecution of cybercrime, given that Nigerian cybercriminals defraud victims all over the world.
Healthcare, 2022
Purpose: We aimed to understand the extent of facemask usage resulting from the third wave of the... more Purpose: We aimed to understand the extent of facemask usage resulting from the third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in an Afghan context. In Afghanistan, new COVID-19 variants, low vaccination rates, political turmoil, and poverty interact not only with the third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic but also with facemask usage. Methods: We collected data (n = 1970) by visually observing the usage and type of facemasks used among visitors entering healthcare facilities in Kabul. We conducted an observational study observing the use of facemasks among 1279 men and 691 women. Results: While 71% of all participants adhered to wearing facemasks, 94% of these users wore surgical masks, and 86% wore all types of facemasks correctly. Interestingly, women adhered to wearing facemasks more than men. Specifically, of all the participants who were not wearing masks, 20% were men, and only 8% were women. Even though men were more in number in our study (64.9%), women have a higher adherence rate to wearing facemasks than men. Conclusions: We conclude that gender socialization and expectations of women to wear the niqab or hijab interact with their adherence to wearing facemasks. Additionally, since Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world, which has witnessed a considerable period of political turmoil, we spotlight that our findings are rare in scholarship as they represent a distinct non-Western Islamic society with a low scale of COVID-19 vaccination. Therefore, more research is needed to assess the general population’s socioeconomic and geopolitical barriers to facemask use, given that Afghanistan is an underrepresented social context. Our findings are expected to aid health policymakers in developing novel prevention strategies for the country.
The Conversation, 2019
Singers generally use artistic conventions to construct marketable music personas. But that is n... more Singers generally use artistic conventions to construct marketable music personas. But that is not the whole picture. Some Nigerian singers glamorize cybercrime and online offenders (Yahoo Boys). I examined lyrics from 2007 to 2017 involving 18 hip-hop artists. All the songs I studied were by male singers apart from one entitled, “Maga no need pay,” which involved seven multiple artists. The theme I sought out in all the songs was the glamorization of cybercrime and cybercriminals.
Demonstrating the Therapeutic Values of Poetry in Doctoral Research: Autoethnographic Steps from the Enchanted Forest to a PhD by Publication Path
Methodological Innovations, 2021
We rarely acknowledge the achievements of doctoral candidates who fought with all they had but st... more We rarely acknowledge the achievements of doctoral candidates who fought with all they had but still lost the battle and dropped out – we know so little about what becomes of them. This reflective article is about the betrayals of PhD supervisors in one institution, the trauma and stigma of withdrawing from that institution, writing poetry as a coping mechanism and the triumph in completing a Thesis by Publication (TBP) in another institution. Thus, I build on Lesley Saunders’s idea about using poetry to operate on ‘a personal capacity’ in educational research. Accordingly, I present an original autoethnographic poem and other poetic artefacts as well as reflections to sharpen the sociological eye of my story. In it, I merge two different segments of experiences in poetry – trauma and triumph – to draw an image of my doctoral journey, in the moment and in retrospection. By doing so, I illuminate the struggles involved in becoming an independent researcher. I also encourage practitioners to conceive that their negative experiences in doing educational research can be transformed into an achievement depending on the stand they take when faced with it. Certainly, poor academic performance can be closely associated with abandoning doctoral studies, but that is not always the case. Therefore, it is my hope that this autoethnographic work may instill hope in doctoral candidates who are still in the struggle to find a voice.
Laws, 2019
While this article aims to explore the connections between citizenship and ‘race’, it is the firs... more While this article aims to explore the connections between citizenship and ‘race’, it is the first study to use fictional tools as a sociological resource in exemplifying the deviation between citizenship in principle and practice in an Austrian context. The study involves interviews with 73 Austrians from three ethnic/racial groups, which were subjected to a directed approach to qualitative content analysis and coded based on sentences from George Orwell’s fictional book, ‘Animal Farm’. By using fiction as a conceptual and analytical device, this article goes beyond the orthodox particulars of citizenship to expose the compressed entitlements of some racial/ethnic minorities. In particular, data analysis revealed two related and intertwined central themes: (a) “all animals are not equal or comrades”; and (b) “some animals are more equal than others.” All ‘animals’ may be equal in principle, whereas, in practice, their ‘race’ serves as a critical source of social (dis)advantage in the ‘animal kingdom’. Thus, since citizenship is a precondition for possessing certain rights that non-citizens are not granted, I argue that citizenship cannot only be judged by whom it, in theory, excludes (i.e., non-citizens), but also by how it treats the included (i.e., citizens) on the basis of their ‘race’. I conclude that skin colour is a specific aspect of the hierarchy of citizenship in Austria, which reinforces that ‘some animals are more equal than others’.
Telematics and Informatics, 2019
While this article sets out to advance our knowledge about the characteristics of Nigerian cyberc... more While this article sets out to advance our knowledge about the characteristics of Nigerian cybercriminals (Yahoo-Boys), it is also the first study to explore the narratives of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) officers concerning them. It appraises symbolic interactionist insights to consider the ways in which contextual factors and worldview may help to illuminate officers' narratives of cybercriminals and the interpretations and implications of such accounts. Semi-structured interviews of forty frontline EFCC officers formed the empirical basis of this study and were subjected to a directed approach of qualitative content analysis. While prior studies, for example, indicated that only a group of cybercriminals deploy spiritual and magical powers to defraud victims (i.e. modus operandi), our data analysis extended this classification into more refined levels involving multiple features. In particular, analysis bifurcates cybercriminals and their operations based on three factors: educational-attainment, modus-operandi, and networks-collaborators. Results also suggest that these cybercriminals and their operations are embedded in "masculinity-and-material-wealth". These contributions thus have implications for a range of generally accepted viewpoints about these cybercriminals previously taken-for-granted. Since these criminals have victims all over the world, insights from our study may help various local and international agencies [a] to understand the actions/features of these two groups of cybercriminals better and develop more effective response strategies. [b] to understand the vulnerabilities of their victims better and develop more adequate support schemes. We also consider the limitations of social control agents' narratives on criminals.
International Social Science Journal , 2019
This article is a theoretical treatment of feminist epistemology of crime, which advocates the ce... more This article is a theoretical treatment of feminist epistemology of crime, which advocates the centrality of gender as a theoretical starting point for the investigating of digital crimes. It does so by exploring the synergy between the feminist perspectives and the Tripartite Cybercrime Framework (TCF) (which argues that three possible factors motivate cybercrimes – socioeconomic, psychosocial, and geopolitical) to critique mainstream criminology and the meaning of the term “cybercrime”. Additionally, the article examines gender gaps in online harassment, cyber‐bullying, cyber‐fraud, revenge porn, and cyber‐stalking to demonstrate that who is victimised, why, and to what effect are the critical starting points for the analysis of the connections between gender and crimes. In turn, it uses the lens of intersectionality to acknowledge that, while conceptions of gender and crime interact, they intersect with other categories (e.g., sexuality) to provide additional layers of explanation. To nuance the utilitarian value of the synergy between the TCF and the feminist perspectives, the focus shifts to a recent case study (which compared socioeconomic and psychosocial cybercrimes). The article concludes that, while online and offline lives are inextricably intertwined, the victimisations in psychosocial cybercrimes may be more gendered than in socioeconomic cybercrimes. These contributions align the TCF to the feminist epistemology of crime in their attempt to move gender analysis of digital crimes “from margin to centre”.
Religions, 2019
This article is a theoretical treatment of the ways in which local worldviews on wealth acquisiti... more This article is a theoretical treatment of the ways in which local worldviews on wealth acquisition give rise to contemporary manifestations of spirituality in cyberspace. It unpacks spiritual (occult) economies and wealth generation through a historical perspective. The article ‘devil advocates’ the ‘sainthood’ of claimed law-abiding citizens, by highlighting that the line dividing them and the Nigerian cybercriminals (Yahoo-Boys) is blurred with regards to the use of magical means for material ends. By doing so, the article also illustrates that the intersectionality of the spirit world and the acquisition of wealth (crime or otherwise) is connected with local epistemologies and worldviews, and its contemporaneity has social security benefits. Therefore, the view that the contemporary manifestations of spirituality in cyberspace signify a ‘new-danger’ and an ever-increasing outrage in Nigerian society is misplaced. I conclude that if people believe all aspects of life are reflective of the spiritual world and determined by it, the spiritual realm, by implication, is the base of society, upon which sits the superstructure comprised of all aspects of life, especially wealth. Inferentially, this conceptual position that the spirit world is the base of society is an inversion of Orthodox Marxist’s theory of economic determinism.
Criminology, criminal Justice, Law & Society, 2018
This study sets out to examine the ways Nigerian cyber-fraudsters (Yahoo-Boys) are represented in... more This study sets out to examine the ways Nigerian cyber-fraudsters (Yahoo-Boys) are represented in hip-hop music. The empirical basis of this article is lyrics from 18 hip-hop artists, which were subjected to a directed approach to qualitative content analysis and coded based on the moral disengagement mechanisms proposed by Bandura (1999). While results revealed that the ethics of Yahoo-Boys, as expressed by musicians, embody a range of moral disengagement mechanisms, they also shed light on the motives for the Nigerian cybercriminals' actions. Further analysis revealed additional findings: " glamorization/de-glamorization of cyber-fraud " and " sex-roles-and-cultures ". Having operated within the constraint of what is currently available (a small sample size), this article has drawn attention to the notion that Yahoo-Boys and some musicians may be " birds of a feather. " Secondly, it has exposed a " hunter-and-antelope-relationship " between Yahoo-Boys and their victims. Thirdly, it has also highlighted that some ethos of law-abiding citizens is central to Yahoo-Boys' moral enterprise. Yahoo-Boys, therefore, represent reflections of society. Arguably, given that Yahoo-Boys and singers are connected, and the oratory messages of singers may attract more followers than questioners, this study illuminates the cultural dimensions of cyber-fraud that emanate from Nigeria. In particular, insights from this study suggest that cyber-fraud researchers might look beyond traditional data sources (e.g., cyber-fraud statistics) for the empirical traces of " culture in action " that render fraudulently practices acceptable career paths for some Nigerian youths. Keywords: youth culture and popular music, yahoo boys and cyber criminology, neutralization techniques, advance fee fraud and organised crime, moral disengagement mechanisms, glamorization of cybercrime, sex roles, victims of romance scam, cyberpsychology
Sociological Research Online, 2018
This article reviews an epochal change in international thinking about physical punishment of chi... more This article reviews an epochal change in international thinking about physical punishment of children from being a reasonable method of chastisement to one that is harmful to children and troubling to families. In addition, the article suggests shifts in thinking about physical punishment were originally pioneered as part and parcel of the dismantling of national laws granting fathers’ specific rights to admonish children under conventions of patria potestas. A comparative historical framework of analysis involving two case studies of Ireland and Ghana illustrates non-unilinear pathways of international convergence towards the prohibition of physical punishment. The comparative historical analysis highlights the 1930s and 1940s as an era when Ireland began to reject patria potestas and religious or judicial rulings which allowed for children to be given ‘a good beating’ in the family and school settings. However, from the same period, Ghana is seen to experience Christian remonstrations not to ‘spare the rod’ leading to the ‘conventional’ tradition of ‘this is how we do it here’. Two case studies serve to illustrate that banning physical punishment was less controversial in Ireland where allied traditions of patria potestas and disciplinarian Christian beliefs had lost their moral hegemony than in Ghana where such beliefs still held influence. The article concludes overall that normative campaigns against physical punishment of children emanate from a coherent paradigm of family policy where childcare, education, and well-being of children are embedded as everyday societal responsibilities rather than privatised or patriarchal familial obligations. The coherent model offers an alternative moral hegemony to neo-liberal and Janus-faced conceptualisations of good or ‘intact’ families versus ‘broken’ or ‘troubled’ families.
Journal of Comparative Family Studies, 2017
Seeking the views of university educated Nigerians in Lagos and Abuja (the previous and current c... more Seeking the views of university educated Nigerians in Lagos and Abuja (the previous and current capital cities respectively), our study explores gendered perspectives on the issue of remarriage after divorce to gain a deeper understanding of how customary, Islamic and statutory laws intersect. We build on previous studies (e.g. Therborn, 2004) to highlight that from the 1930s onwards, marital aspects of modern customary laws may be more patriarchal than some pre-colonial ones due to the colonial codification of customary laws in Africa. The empirical basis of our study is interviews with 24 Nigerian men and women, including female divorcees. The results suggest that what Ibrahim (2015) calls “the sociocultural penalties of divorce” are borne more heavily by women, and this is exacerbated because traditional or customary laws in modern Nigeria were re-shaped by colonial Christian codification. We conclude that while Yoruba people seem to have thwarted some of the more negative legacies of religious codification on traditional laws more than other major ethnic groups, customary laws in Nigeria still require re-codification to take on board the perspectives of African feminism.
IEEE , 2016
— The causations of crimes that are relevant in the cyberspace concurrently impact in the physica... more — The causations of crimes that are relevant in the cyberspace concurrently impact in the physical space and vise versa. This paper aims to explore parents' perceptions of the factors that cause socioeconomic cybercrime in Nigeria. Despite a long-standing view that the juvenile offenders of today could become the hardened criminals of tomorrow, and the conclusions of a number of developmental theories on the stability of delinquency across the life course, the existing data on cybercrimes in Nigeria have principally been derived from studies involving university students. Yet, individuals' moral-standard-levels, which shape their offending capacities, are mostly developed in childhood. The empirical basis for this paper is face-to-face interviews with 17 Nigerian parents regarding children's vulnerability to involvement in cybercrime. Drawing upon qualitative data, this paper argues that a complex web of familial factors and structural forces, alongside cultural forces, explains the degree of cybercrime involvement on the part of Nigerian youths.
International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice, 2016
This article aims to establish the particularities of cybercrime in Nigeria and whether these sug... more This article aims to establish the particularities of cybercrime in Nigeria and whether these suggest problems with prevailing taxonomies of cybercrime. Nigeria is representative of the Sub-Saharan region, and an exemplary cultural context to illustrate the importance of incorporating social and contextual factors into cybercrime classifications. This paper anchors upon a basic principle of categorisation alongside motivational theories, to offer a tripartite conceptual framework for grouping cybercrime nexus. It argues that cybercrimes are motivated by three possible factors: socioeconomic, psychosocial and geopolitical. This contribution provides new ways of making sense of the voluminous variances of cyber-crime. Concomitantly, it enables a clearer conceptualisation of cybercrime in Nigeria and elsewhere, because jurisdictional cultures and nuances apply online as they do offline.
International Journal of Human Rights and Constitutional Studies, 2016
This article deploys a critical examination of criminology-claims regarding connections between p... more This article deploys a critical examination of criminology-claims regarding connections between physical punishment (PP) and juvenile delinquency connection. With a particular focus on PP of children as a risk factor, this article explores the multifacetedness of ‘what is true of all societies and what is true of one society at one point in time and space’. Drawing on sociocultural variations, Ghana and Finland, representing Sub-Saharan and Nordic regions respectively, will be presented as two different kinds of exemplary cultural contexts.
A critical look is also taken on the UN Convention (1989) on children’s rights regarding global-sociocultural diversity in child-rearing and parenting. It is maintained that mainstream criminological associations between PP and juvenile delinquency are not universalisable due to sociocultural variations across regions. Concomitantly, tensions remain in understanding the impacts of PP vis-a-vis mainstream child protection discourses/practices as well as making these discourses/practices a reality in non-Western regions such as Ghana.
Contemporary Perspectives in Family Research, 2015
Purpose: In terms of the concept of broken home as a juvenile delinquency risk factor, whilst Nig... more Purpose: In terms of the concept of broken home as a juvenile delinquency risk factor, whilst Nigeria and Ghana are culturally different from western nations (Gyekye, 1996; Hofstede, 1980; Smith, 2004), parental death (PDE) and parental divorce (PDI) have been previously taken-for-granted as one factor, that is ‘broken home’. This paper aims to deconstruct the singular model of ‘broken home’ and propose a binary model – the parental death and parental divorce hypotheses, with unique variables inherent in Nigerian/Ghanaian context.
Methodology/approach: It principally deploys the application of Goffman’s (1967) theory of stigma, anthropological insights on burial rites and other social facts (Gyekye, 1996; Mazzucato et al., 2006; Smith, 2004) to tease out diversity and complexity of lives across cultures, which specifically represent a binary model of broken home in Nigeria/Ghana. It slightly appraises post-colonial insights on decolonization (Agozino, 2003; Said, 1994) to interrogate both marginalized and mainstream literature.
Findings: Thus far, analyses have challenged the homogenization of the concept broken home in existing literature. Qualitatively unlike in the ‘West’, analyses have identified the varying meanings/consequences of parental divorce and parental death in Nigeria/Ghana.
Originality/value: Unlike existing data, this paper has contrasted the differential impacts of parental death and parental divorce with more refined variables (e.g. the sociocultural penalties of divorce such as stigma in terms of parental divorce and other social facts such as burial ceremonies, kinship nurturing, in relation to parental death), which helped to fill in the missing gap in comparative criminology literature.
Conference Presentations by Suleman I B R A H I M Lazarus
Teaching Documents by Suleman I B R A H I M Lazarus
![Research paper thumbnail of London Riots 2011 [lecture slides]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/63833688/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Papers by Suleman I B R A H I M Lazarus
Just married: the synergy between feminist criminology and the Tripartite Cybercrime Framework
International Social Science Journal
This article is a theoretical treatment of feminist epistemology of crime, which advocates the ce... more This article is a theoretical treatment of feminist epistemology of crime, which advocates the centrality of gender as a theoretical starting point for the investigating of digital crimes. It does so by exploring the synergy between the feminist perspectives and the Tripartite Cybercrime Framework (TCF) (which argues that three possible factors motivate cybercrimes – socioeconomic, psychosocial, and geopolitical) to critique mainstream criminology and the meaning of the term “cybercrime”. Additionally, the article examines gender gaps in online harassment, cyber‐bullying, cyber‐fraud, revenge porn, and cyber‐stalking to demonstrate that who is victimised, why, and to what effect are the critical starting points for the analysis of the connections between gender and crimes. In turn, it uses the lens of intersectionality to acknowledge that, while conceptions of gender and crime interact, they intersect with other categories (e.g., sexuality) to provide additional layers of explanation. To nuance the utilitarian value of the synergy between the TCF and the feminist perspectives, the focus shifts to a recent case study (which compared socioeconomic and psychosocial cybercrimes). The article concludes that, while online and offline lives are inextricably intertwined, the victimisations in psychosocial cybercrimes may be more gendered than in socioeconomic cybercrimes. These contributions align the TCF to the feminist epistemology of crime in their attempt to move gender analysis of digital crimes “from margin to centre”.
Heliyon, 2022
This article is about the manifestations of similarities between two seemingly distinct groups of... more This article is about the manifestations of similarities between two seemingly distinct groups of Nigerians: cybercriminals and politicians. Which linguistic strategies do Twitter users use to express their opinions on cybercriminals and politicians? The study undertakes a qualitative analysis of 'engaged' tweets of an elite law enforcement agency in West Africa. We analyzed and coded over 100,000 'engaged' tweets based on a component of mechanisms of moral disengagement (i.e., advantageous comparison), a linguistic device. The results reveal how respondents defend the actions of online fraudsters ("the deviant group") by strategically comparing them to the wrongful acts of corrupt politicians ("the respectable group"). Similarly, the results show how respondents positioned this linguistic strategy to compare "the powerless group" (online fraudsters) and "the powerful group" (politicians) in society. Indeed, tweet responses suggest that the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) generally looks downwards for culprits (i.e., online fraudsters) while ignoring fraudulent politicians. We conclude that the process by which some actions are interpreted as a crime compared to others is a moral enterprise.
Tweets and reactions: revealing the geographies of cybercrime perpetrators and the north-south divide
Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 2022
How do tweets reflect the long-standing disparities between the northern and southern regions of ... more How do tweets reflect the long-standing disparities between the northern and southern regions of Nigeria? This study presents a qualitative analysis of Twitter users' responses (n = 101,518) to the tweets of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) regarding the production and prosecution of cybercrime. The article uses postcolonial perspectives to shed light on the legacies of British colonial efforts in Nigeria, such as the amalgamation of the northern and southern protectorates in 1914. The results revealed significant discrepancies between Nigeria's northern and southern regions regarding cybercriminal arrest, conviction, and sentencing. Specifically, the results showed that the EFCC's criminalization of Southerners differs substantially from that of Northerners. The contemporary manifestation of inequalities concerning the production and prosecution of cybercrime on Twitter reflects long-standing contestations (e.g., economic, political, cultural, geological) between the northern and southern parts of Nigerian society. Therefore, since the North-South divide in present-day Nigeria originated from British colonization, colonialism is the base that shaped the superstructure comprising political, religious, historical, geological (e.g., crude oil), and economic factors. In turn, the article spotlights that regional differences in educational attainment, originating from differing experiences of Christianization and colonization, interact with regional disparities in the production of cybercrime. More research is required to better understand how these contextual disparities in society interact with the production and prosecution of cybercrime, given that Nigerian cybercriminals defraud victims all over the world.
Healthcare, 2022
Purpose: We aimed to understand the extent of facemask usage resulting from the third wave of the... more Purpose: We aimed to understand the extent of facemask usage resulting from the third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in an Afghan context. In Afghanistan, new COVID-19 variants, low vaccination rates, political turmoil, and poverty interact not only with the third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic but also with facemask usage. Methods: We collected data (n = 1970) by visually observing the usage and type of facemasks used among visitors entering healthcare facilities in Kabul. We conducted an observational study observing the use of facemasks among 1279 men and 691 women. Results: While 71% of all participants adhered to wearing facemasks, 94% of these users wore surgical masks, and 86% wore all types of facemasks correctly. Interestingly, women adhered to wearing facemasks more than men. Specifically, of all the participants who were not wearing masks, 20% were men, and only 8% were women. Even though men were more in number in our study (64.9%), women have a higher adherence rate to wearing facemasks than men. Conclusions: We conclude that gender socialization and expectations of women to wear the niqab or hijab interact with their adherence to wearing facemasks. Additionally, since Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world, which has witnessed a considerable period of political turmoil, we spotlight that our findings are rare in scholarship as they represent a distinct non-Western Islamic society with a low scale of COVID-19 vaccination. Therefore, more research is needed to assess the general population’s socioeconomic and geopolitical barriers to facemask use, given that Afghanistan is an underrepresented social context. Our findings are expected to aid health policymakers in developing novel prevention strategies for the country.
The Conversation, 2019
Singers generally use artistic conventions to construct marketable music personas. But that is n... more Singers generally use artistic conventions to construct marketable music personas. But that is not the whole picture. Some Nigerian singers glamorize cybercrime and online offenders (Yahoo Boys). I examined lyrics from 2007 to 2017 involving 18 hip-hop artists. All the songs I studied were by male singers apart from one entitled, “Maga no need pay,” which involved seven multiple artists. The theme I sought out in all the songs was the glamorization of cybercrime and cybercriminals.
Demonstrating the Therapeutic Values of Poetry in Doctoral Research: Autoethnographic Steps from the Enchanted Forest to a PhD by Publication Path
Methodological Innovations, 2021
We rarely acknowledge the achievements of doctoral candidates who fought with all they had but st... more We rarely acknowledge the achievements of doctoral candidates who fought with all they had but still lost the battle and dropped out – we know so little about what becomes of them. This reflective article is about the betrayals of PhD supervisors in one institution, the trauma and stigma of withdrawing from that institution, writing poetry as a coping mechanism and the triumph in completing a Thesis by Publication (TBP) in another institution. Thus, I build on Lesley Saunders’s idea about using poetry to operate on ‘a personal capacity’ in educational research. Accordingly, I present an original autoethnographic poem and other poetic artefacts as well as reflections to sharpen the sociological eye of my story. In it, I merge two different segments of experiences in poetry – trauma and triumph – to draw an image of my doctoral journey, in the moment and in retrospection. By doing so, I illuminate the struggles involved in becoming an independent researcher. I also encourage practitioners to conceive that their negative experiences in doing educational research can be transformed into an achievement depending on the stand they take when faced with it. Certainly, poor academic performance can be closely associated with abandoning doctoral studies, but that is not always the case. Therefore, it is my hope that this autoethnographic work may instill hope in doctoral candidates who are still in the struggle to find a voice.
Laws, 2019
While this article aims to explore the connections between citizenship and ‘race’, it is the firs... more While this article aims to explore the connections between citizenship and ‘race’, it is the first study to use fictional tools as a sociological resource in exemplifying the deviation between citizenship in principle and practice in an Austrian context. The study involves interviews with 73 Austrians from three ethnic/racial groups, which were subjected to a directed approach to qualitative content analysis and coded based on sentences from George Orwell’s fictional book, ‘Animal Farm’. By using fiction as a conceptual and analytical device, this article goes beyond the orthodox particulars of citizenship to expose the compressed entitlements of some racial/ethnic minorities. In particular, data analysis revealed two related and intertwined central themes: (a) “all animals are not equal or comrades”; and (b) “some animals are more equal than others.” All ‘animals’ may be equal in principle, whereas, in practice, their ‘race’ serves as a critical source of social (dis)advantage in the ‘animal kingdom’. Thus, since citizenship is a precondition for possessing certain rights that non-citizens are not granted, I argue that citizenship cannot only be judged by whom it, in theory, excludes (i.e., non-citizens), but also by how it treats the included (i.e., citizens) on the basis of their ‘race’. I conclude that skin colour is a specific aspect of the hierarchy of citizenship in Austria, which reinforces that ‘some animals are more equal than others’.
Telematics and Informatics, 2019
While this article sets out to advance our knowledge about the characteristics of Nigerian cyberc... more While this article sets out to advance our knowledge about the characteristics of Nigerian cybercriminals (Yahoo-Boys), it is also the first study to explore the narratives of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) officers concerning them. It appraises symbolic interactionist insights to consider the ways in which contextual factors and worldview may help to illuminate officers' narratives of cybercriminals and the interpretations and implications of such accounts. Semi-structured interviews of forty frontline EFCC officers formed the empirical basis of this study and were subjected to a directed approach of qualitative content analysis. While prior studies, for example, indicated that only a group of cybercriminals deploy spiritual and magical powers to defraud victims (i.e. modus operandi), our data analysis extended this classification into more refined levels involving multiple features. In particular, analysis bifurcates cybercriminals and their operations based on three factors: educational-attainment, modus-operandi, and networks-collaborators. Results also suggest that these cybercriminals and their operations are embedded in "masculinity-and-material-wealth". These contributions thus have implications for a range of generally accepted viewpoints about these cybercriminals previously taken-for-granted. Since these criminals have victims all over the world, insights from our study may help various local and international agencies [a] to understand the actions/features of these two groups of cybercriminals better and develop more effective response strategies. [b] to understand the vulnerabilities of their victims better and develop more adequate support schemes. We also consider the limitations of social control agents' narratives on criminals.
International Social Science Journal , 2019
This article is a theoretical treatment of feminist epistemology of crime, which advocates the ce... more This article is a theoretical treatment of feminist epistemology of crime, which advocates the centrality of gender as a theoretical starting point for the investigating of digital crimes. It does so by exploring the synergy between the feminist perspectives and the Tripartite Cybercrime Framework (TCF) (which argues that three possible factors motivate cybercrimes – socioeconomic, psychosocial, and geopolitical) to critique mainstream criminology and the meaning of the term “cybercrime”. Additionally, the article examines gender gaps in online harassment, cyber‐bullying, cyber‐fraud, revenge porn, and cyber‐stalking to demonstrate that who is victimised, why, and to what effect are the critical starting points for the analysis of the connections between gender and crimes. In turn, it uses the lens of intersectionality to acknowledge that, while conceptions of gender and crime interact, they intersect with other categories (e.g., sexuality) to provide additional layers of explanation. To nuance the utilitarian value of the synergy between the TCF and the feminist perspectives, the focus shifts to a recent case study (which compared socioeconomic and psychosocial cybercrimes). The article concludes that, while online and offline lives are inextricably intertwined, the victimisations in psychosocial cybercrimes may be more gendered than in socioeconomic cybercrimes. These contributions align the TCF to the feminist epistemology of crime in their attempt to move gender analysis of digital crimes “from margin to centre”.
Religions, 2019
This article is a theoretical treatment of the ways in which local worldviews on wealth acquisiti... more This article is a theoretical treatment of the ways in which local worldviews on wealth acquisition give rise to contemporary manifestations of spirituality in cyberspace. It unpacks spiritual (occult) economies and wealth generation through a historical perspective. The article ‘devil advocates’ the ‘sainthood’ of claimed law-abiding citizens, by highlighting that the line dividing them and the Nigerian cybercriminals (Yahoo-Boys) is blurred with regards to the use of magical means for material ends. By doing so, the article also illustrates that the intersectionality of the spirit world and the acquisition of wealth (crime or otherwise) is connected with local epistemologies and worldviews, and its contemporaneity has social security benefits. Therefore, the view that the contemporary manifestations of spirituality in cyberspace signify a ‘new-danger’ and an ever-increasing outrage in Nigerian society is misplaced. I conclude that if people believe all aspects of life are reflective of the spiritual world and determined by it, the spiritual realm, by implication, is the base of society, upon which sits the superstructure comprised of all aspects of life, especially wealth. Inferentially, this conceptual position that the spirit world is the base of society is an inversion of Orthodox Marxist’s theory of economic determinism.
Criminology, criminal Justice, Law & Society, 2018
This study sets out to examine the ways Nigerian cyber-fraudsters (Yahoo-Boys) are represented in... more This study sets out to examine the ways Nigerian cyber-fraudsters (Yahoo-Boys) are represented in hip-hop music. The empirical basis of this article is lyrics from 18 hip-hop artists, which were subjected to a directed approach to qualitative content analysis and coded based on the moral disengagement mechanisms proposed by Bandura (1999). While results revealed that the ethics of Yahoo-Boys, as expressed by musicians, embody a range of moral disengagement mechanisms, they also shed light on the motives for the Nigerian cybercriminals' actions. Further analysis revealed additional findings: " glamorization/de-glamorization of cyber-fraud " and " sex-roles-and-cultures ". Having operated within the constraint of what is currently available (a small sample size), this article has drawn attention to the notion that Yahoo-Boys and some musicians may be " birds of a feather. " Secondly, it has exposed a " hunter-and-antelope-relationship " between Yahoo-Boys and their victims. Thirdly, it has also highlighted that some ethos of law-abiding citizens is central to Yahoo-Boys' moral enterprise. Yahoo-Boys, therefore, represent reflections of society. Arguably, given that Yahoo-Boys and singers are connected, and the oratory messages of singers may attract more followers than questioners, this study illuminates the cultural dimensions of cyber-fraud that emanate from Nigeria. In particular, insights from this study suggest that cyber-fraud researchers might look beyond traditional data sources (e.g., cyber-fraud statistics) for the empirical traces of " culture in action " that render fraudulently practices acceptable career paths for some Nigerian youths. Keywords: youth culture and popular music, yahoo boys and cyber criminology, neutralization techniques, advance fee fraud and organised crime, moral disengagement mechanisms, glamorization of cybercrime, sex roles, victims of romance scam, cyberpsychology
Sociological Research Online, 2018
This article reviews an epochal change in international thinking about physical punishment of chi... more This article reviews an epochal change in international thinking about physical punishment of children from being a reasonable method of chastisement to one that is harmful to children and troubling to families. In addition, the article suggests shifts in thinking about physical punishment were originally pioneered as part and parcel of the dismantling of national laws granting fathers’ specific rights to admonish children under conventions of patria potestas. A comparative historical framework of analysis involving two case studies of Ireland and Ghana illustrates non-unilinear pathways of international convergence towards the prohibition of physical punishment. The comparative historical analysis highlights the 1930s and 1940s as an era when Ireland began to reject patria potestas and religious or judicial rulings which allowed for children to be given ‘a good beating’ in the family and school settings. However, from the same period, Ghana is seen to experience Christian remonstrations not to ‘spare the rod’ leading to the ‘conventional’ tradition of ‘this is how we do it here’. Two case studies serve to illustrate that banning physical punishment was less controversial in Ireland where allied traditions of patria potestas and disciplinarian Christian beliefs had lost their moral hegemony than in Ghana where such beliefs still held influence. The article concludes overall that normative campaigns against physical punishment of children emanate from a coherent paradigm of family policy where childcare, education, and well-being of children are embedded as everyday societal responsibilities rather than privatised or patriarchal familial obligations. The coherent model offers an alternative moral hegemony to neo-liberal and Janus-faced conceptualisations of good or ‘intact’ families versus ‘broken’ or ‘troubled’ families.
Journal of Comparative Family Studies, 2017
Seeking the views of university educated Nigerians in Lagos and Abuja (the previous and current c... more Seeking the views of university educated Nigerians in Lagos and Abuja (the previous and current capital cities respectively), our study explores gendered perspectives on the issue of remarriage after divorce to gain a deeper understanding of how customary, Islamic and statutory laws intersect. We build on previous studies (e.g. Therborn, 2004) to highlight that from the 1930s onwards, marital aspects of modern customary laws may be more patriarchal than some pre-colonial ones due to the colonial codification of customary laws in Africa. The empirical basis of our study is interviews with 24 Nigerian men and women, including female divorcees. The results suggest that what Ibrahim (2015) calls “the sociocultural penalties of divorce” are borne more heavily by women, and this is exacerbated because traditional or customary laws in modern Nigeria were re-shaped by colonial Christian codification. We conclude that while Yoruba people seem to have thwarted some of the more negative legacies of religious codification on traditional laws more than other major ethnic groups, customary laws in Nigeria still require re-codification to take on board the perspectives of African feminism.
IEEE , 2016
— The causations of crimes that are relevant in the cyberspace concurrently impact in the physica... more — The causations of crimes that are relevant in the cyberspace concurrently impact in the physical space and vise versa. This paper aims to explore parents' perceptions of the factors that cause socioeconomic cybercrime in Nigeria. Despite a long-standing view that the juvenile offenders of today could become the hardened criminals of tomorrow, and the conclusions of a number of developmental theories on the stability of delinquency across the life course, the existing data on cybercrimes in Nigeria have principally been derived from studies involving university students. Yet, individuals' moral-standard-levels, which shape their offending capacities, are mostly developed in childhood. The empirical basis for this paper is face-to-face interviews with 17 Nigerian parents regarding children's vulnerability to involvement in cybercrime. Drawing upon qualitative data, this paper argues that a complex web of familial factors and structural forces, alongside cultural forces, explains the degree of cybercrime involvement on the part of Nigerian youths.
International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice, 2016
This article aims to establish the particularities of cybercrime in Nigeria and whether these sug... more This article aims to establish the particularities of cybercrime in Nigeria and whether these suggest problems with prevailing taxonomies of cybercrime. Nigeria is representative of the Sub-Saharan region, and an exemplary cultural context to illustrate the importance of incorporating social and contextual factors into cybercrime classifications. This paper anchors upon a basic principle of categorisation alongside motivational theories, to offer a tripartite conceptual framework for grouping cybercrime nexus. It argues that cybercrimes are motivated by three possible factors: socioeconomic, psychosocial and geopolitical. This contribution provides new ways of making sense of the voluminous variances of cyber-crime. Concomitantly, it enables a clearer conceptualisation of cybercrime in Nigeria and elsewhere, because jurisdictional cultures and nuances apply online as they do offline.
International Journal of Human Rights and Constitutional Studies, 2016
This article deploys a critical examination of criminology-claims regarding connections between p... more This article deploys a critical examination of criminology-claims regarding connections between physical punishment (PP) and juvenile delinquency connection. With a particular focus on PP of children as a risk factor, this article explores the multifacetedness of ‘what is true of all societies and what is true of one society at one point in time and space’. Drawing on sociocultural variations, Ghana and Finland, representing Sub-Saharan and Nordic regions respectively, will be presented as two different kinds of exemplary cultural contexts.
A critical look is also taken on the UN Convention (1989) on children’s rights regarding global-sociocultural diversity in child-rearing and parenting. It is maintained that mainstream criminological associations between PP and juvenile delinquency are not universalisable due to sociocultural variations across regions. Concomitantly, tensions remain in understanding the impacts of PP vis-a-vis mainstream child protection discourses/practices as well as making these discourses/practices a reality in non-Western regions such as Ghana.
Contemporary Perspectives in Family Research, 2015
Purpose: In terms of the concept of broken home as a juvenile delinquency risk factor, whilst Nig... more Purpose: In terms of the concept of broken home as a juvenile delinquency risk factor, whilst Nigeria and Ghana are culturally different from western nations (Gyekye, 1996; Hofstede, 1980; Smith, 2004), parental death (PDE) and parental divorce (PDI) have been previously taken-for-granted as one factor, that is ‘broken home’. This paper aims to deconstruct the singular model of ‘broken home’ and propose a binary model – the parental death and parental divorce hypotheses, with unique variables inherent in Nigerian/Ghanaian context.
Methodology/approach: It principally deploys the application of Goffman’s (1967) theory of stigma, anthropological insights on burial rites and other social facts (Gyekye, 1996; Mazzucato et al., 2006; Smith, 2004) to tease out diversity and complexity of lives across cultures, which specifically represent a binary model of broken home in Nigeria/Ghana. It slightly appraises post-colonial insights on decolonization (Agozino, 2003; Said, 1994) to interrogate both marginalized and mainstream literature.
Findings: Thus far, analyses have challenged the homogenization of the concept broken home in existing literature. Qualitatively unlike in the ‘West’, analyses have identified the varying meanings/consequences of parental divorce and parental death in Nigeria/Ghana.
Originality/value: Unlike existing data, this paper has contrasted the differential impacts of parental death and parental divorce with more refined variables (e.g. the sociocultural penalties of divorce such as stigma in terms of parental divorce and other social facts such as burial ceremonies, kinship nurturing, in relation to parental death), which helped to fill in the missing gap in comparative criminology literature.
Just married: the synergy between feminist criminology and the Tripartite Cybercrime Framework
International Social Science Journal
This article is a theoretical treatment of feminist epistemology of crime, which advocates the ce... more This article is a theoretical treatment of feminist epistemology of crime, which advocates the centrality of gender as a theoretical starting point for the investigating of digital crimes. It does so by exploring the synergy between the feminist perspectives and the Tripartite Cybercrime Framework (TCF) (which argues that three possible factors motivate cybercrimes – socioeconomic, psychosocial, and geopolitical) to critique mainstream criminology and the meaning of the term “cybercrime”. Additionally, the article examines gender gaps in online harassment, cyber‐bullying, cyber‐fraud, revenge porn, and cyber‐stalking to demonstrate that who is victimised, why, and to what effect are the critical starting points for the analysis of the connections between gender and crimes. In turn, it uses the lens of intersectionality to acknowledge that, while conceptions of gender and crime interact, they intersect with other categories (e.g., sexuality) to provide additional layers of explanation. To nuance the utilitarian value of the synergy between the TCF and the feminist perspectives, the focus shifts to a recent case study (which compared socioeconomic and psychosocial cybercrimes). The article concludes that, while online and offline lives are inextricably intertwined, the victimisations in psychosocial cybercrimes may be more gendered than in socioeconomic cybercrimes. These contributions align the TCF to the feminist epistemology of crime in their attempt to move gender analysis of digital crimes “from margin to centre”.
Gendered Penalties of Divorce on Remarriage in Nigeria: A Qualitative Study
Journal of Comparative Family Studies
Seeking the views of metropolitan, university educated Nigerians in Lagos and Abuja (the previous... more Seeking the views of metropolitan, university educated Nigerians in Lagos and Abuja (the previous and current capital cities respectively), our study explores gendered perspectives on the issue of remarriage after divorce to gain a deeper understanding of how customary, Islamic and statutory laws intersect. We build on previous studies (e.g. Therborn, 2004) to highlight that from the 1930s onwards, marital aspects of modern customary laws may be more patriarchal than some pre-colonial ones due to the colonial codification of customary laws in Africa. The empirical basis of our study is interviews with 24 Nigerian men and women, including female divorcees. The results suggest that what Ibrahim (2015) calls “the sociocultural penalties of divorce” are borne more heavily by women and this is exacerbated because traditional or customary laws in modern Nigeria were reshaped by colonial Christian codification. We conclude that whilst Yoruba people seem to have thwarted some of the more ne...
Conversation, 2017
(((BEYOND THE FBI LEAGUE TABLES))) ----What is the basis for such a basic claim as Nigeria being ... more (((BEYOND THE FBI LEAGUE TABLES))) ----What is the basis for such a basic claim as Nigeria being a third-worst nation in the world for cybercrime perpetration? Over 90% of crimes reported to the complaints centre (i.e. The FBI-run Internet Crime Complaint Centre) between 2006 and 2010 were primarily about cyber-fraud. Under this specific category, Nigeria was found to be the third most cited nation. But what if categories such as cyber espionage and cyberbullying were covered? Would the outcome be different?---- ----A different approach might be useful. One such approach is the Tripartite Cybercrime Framework which I proposed in 2016) (see "Social and contextual taxonomy of cybercrime: Socioeconomic theory of Nigerian cybercriminals"). This framework helps to simplify league table claims into a nuanced umbrella which includes categories such as, for example, socio-economic cybercrime and geopolitical cybercrime---- (((For more information see))): ---Ibrahim, S. 2016. Social and contextual taxonomy of cybercrime: Socioeconomic theory of Nigerian cybercriminals. International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice, 47, 44-57----. ----Lazarus, S. 2019. Just married: the synergy between feminist criminology and the Tripartite Cybercrime Framework. International Social Science Journal, 69(231), 15-33----.