Stockholm Criminology Symposium 2026: Reflections from Two Perspectives

The Stockholm Criminology Symposium is an annual international event that brings together around 500 researchers, policymakers, and practitioners from across the world. Organized by the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Brottsförebyggande rådet, Brå) on behalf of the Swedish government, it serves as a key forum for sharing and discussing the latest crime policy research.

Exploiting the Need to Belong

Both our sessions on Monday and Tuesday drew genuine interest and sparked active discussions among fellow participants. What seems to resonate is the scale and severity of the phenomenon: this is not a small, isolated misfortune, but a form of crime that exploits something deeply human, our need to be seen, and to belong (Kanervo, Normann & Korhonen 2025). It is precisely this exploitation of ordinary human connection that makes on-line romance scams such a particularly cruel form of crime. As we discuss later, this is also a matter of discountability: the profits go to the pockets of organised crime, while victims and their home societies carry the cost and consequences.

In the workshop, Marko Mikkola challenged some of the common assumptions in cybercrime research, before we share preliminary findings from our own interviews (N=19) with victim-survivors and their loved ones. Participants then worked in small groups on real, anonymised case stories from our interview data, building mind maps that connected the cases to concepts from their own disciplines, from criminology to sociology, economics and psychology. The exercise showed how many different lenses this phenomenon needs: there is no single theory that explains why some people become victims of online romance scams and others do not. 

To put online crime into perspective, if cybercrime were a country, it would be one of the richest in the world, with an ”economy” worth approximately USD 10-12 trillion per year. At that scale, it would rank as the world’s third-largest economy, behind only the United States and China. (Braue 2025.) In 2025, the Finnish police recorded 10,272 cases of online fraud, with estimated financial losses of approximately EUR 88 million. Online romance and document fraud was the third most common type of fraud, accounting for 1,406 cases and losses of EUR 13.6 million (Poliisi, 2026).

We do not believe that the prevalence of cybercrime will decrease over time. On the contrary, we expect it to continue growing. Therefore, we consider it important to study the experiences of cybercrime victimization (Mikkola 2024), so that we can develop guidelines and recommendations to help individuals avoid becoming victims of online crime.

Science, values and politics

On the morning of the symposium’s second day, the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter published an opinion piece by three professors of economics at Stockholm University, arguing that both sides of the ongoing public debate about the role of researchers in politics are mistaken (Hassler, Bold & Krusell, 2026). One side insists that researchers should restrict themselves to presenting facts and avoid normative positions; the other insists that politicians should simply follow scientific recommendations. According to the authors, both positions are oversimplified.

The article, which also touched on debates in climate science, criminology and ecology, argued that confusion between facts and values lies at the core of the disagreement about the role of research in political decision-making. Blurring the line between science and political advocacy, the authors warned, can damage public trust in researchers and make science appear biased or instrumentalized, which risks fuelling polarization between experts and policymakers. Instead, they proposed a more balanced position: researchers should actively contribute knowledge and clarify its consequences, and politicians should take that knowledge seriously, but the final decisions must remain democratic and value-based.

That morning’s reading was still fresh in our minds as we listened to the lectures of that year’s Stockholm Prize in Criminology winners Mark W. Lipsey and Charis E. Kubrin (Stockholm University 2026), later that day. Both speakers returned to the same core message in their brief acceptance speeches at the award ceremony that evening, when they received the Stockholm Prize in Criminology from Queen Silvia: that science is under attack, and that solid knowledge already exists for making well-justified political decisions.

Also present at the award ceremony was Sweden’s Minister of Justice, Gunnar Strömmer. We were probably not the only ones in the audience thinking of his proposal to allow children as young as 13 to be sentenced to prison, a proposal that several expert authorities, including the Swedish Prison and Probation Service (Kriminalvården) and the National Courts Administration (Domstolsverket), as well as numerous criminologists, had opposed, arguing that it lacked empirical support and risked producing harmful, counterproductive effects. On 11 June 2026, the Swedish government announced that it would withdraw the proposal, officially citing insufficient parliamentary support (Reuters, 2026).

The prize lectures

Mark Lipsey, professor emeritus of public policy at Vanderbilt Peabody College, delivered a central message that the long-standing criminological claim that “nothing works” in offender rehabilitation is incorrect. Drawing on decades of meta-analytic research, he argued that rehabilitation programmes can in fact reduce reoffending, but that their effectiveness depends heavily on programme design, implementation quality and appropriate targeting. Rather than asking whether anything works, Lipsey emphasized the importance of identifying which interventions work, for whom, and under what conditions, and of translating that evidence into practice.

Charis E. Kubrin, Chancellor’s Professor of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of Washington, the symposium’s other laureate, urged the audience in her lecture to “double down on democracy”: to commit strongly to democratic principles, transparency and diverse representation. She summarized what research impact requires in four points: speak up for science; the work is not done when the science is done; change happens outside the academy; and science should serve society.

Her words raise a genuine question for us as researchers. Can science serve society if research findings stay within the academic community alone? Do researchers also carry a responsibility for how their knowledge is shared and made accessible? And can a researcher ever be a fully neutral producer of knowledge, without any personal relationship to the phenomenon under study?

Accountability

At the moment, vicrtims of on-line romance scams, their close ones, and their home societies bear both the human and financial cost of these crimes, while the proceeds of this almost risk-free crime flow into the pockets of international organised crime.

In several presentations, the question of accountability resurfaced: who is held accountable, and who is not? Why are some crimes, white-collar crime, for instance, less likely to lead to clear accountability? Ultimately, accountability is not only about punishment, but about recognition, responsibility, and the social processes that define justice. It is a question worth holding onto: how do unequal starting points translate into unequal outcomes, in crime, in punishment, and in who gets to be heard?

For us, this is not only a reflective question. Being accountable, as lecturers and researchers, also means bringing knowledge into practice. In 2024, together with experts from the Romance Scam Recovery project (Nettideittiturva), which supports victims of romance scams and their close ones, we developed the Romanssihuijausten ABC (”Romance Scam ABC”) MOOC for the general public and for professionals who encounter victims of romance scams in their own work (Kanervo, Korhonen & Koski 2024). We continued developing the course content during 2025, and since early 2026 the updated course has been available under the name Romanssihuijausten tunnistaminen, puheeksiotto ja psykososiaalinen tuki uhrille (”Identifying Romance Scams, Raising the Topic and Providing Psychosocial Support to the Victim”). Work on the MOOC eventually led us to begin our doctoral research on romance scams. Going forward, we hope to secure research and project funding to build a deeper understanding of this phenomenon and to develop effective ways to prevent it and reduce how often it happens.

Throughout the symposium, we had deep and meaningful discussions with people from many different disciplines and backgrounds. If there is one thing we took home with us, it is this: we are human, and we need each other. And if human life has a purpose, perhaps it is exactly that.