Actual Policing in Virtual Reality - A Cause of Moral Panic or a Justified Need?

This study aims to describe those aspects that qualify a form of behaviour as a crime in the virtual communities, these highly organised societies of the Internet. But the image of deviances may not be complete without entities watching over them. It is an interesting question, who could lay down and enforce virtual norms, if not the community itself. Today, organised crime, drug trafficking, money laundering, trafficking in human beings, and sexual exploitation of children are such focal issues of criminal law, whose prosecution does not stop at the boundaries of virtual communities, or the Internet. But what justification does the real world's jurisdiction have to intervene in the everyday life of independent virtual communities? If they have the right, who decides on the involvement of real authorities? What legal regulations does real-life law enforcement apply in a virtual space? Is there an appropriate response to crimes committed in the virtual world by real-life jurisdiction, and can different forms of virtual deviance be prevented with the tools of reallife crime prevention? These are the questions that I wish to answer in the followings.