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News Story:
London Phone Crisis: The Rise of Mobile Phone Thieves in 2024
In London, around 157 mobile phones are stolen every day, according to new data published by the Mayor of London. The city has been experiencing a massive increase in phone robberies over the past two years, with bikes and scooters snatching phones in the middle of the street.
University student Beatriz, in a frustrated tone, said that she had only taken her phone out to check the route to get home. “I was double checking which way to go, and in a second, a bike rider took my phone. I was so in shock.”
As police are unable to track down the stolen phones, the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, and the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service, Sir Mark Rowley, have been taking matters seriously since October 2023. In their first meeting, they agreed to ask Apple, Google, and Samsung to design better tracking features in their phones.
“I know that these thieves put the phones in an aluminium bag, so there is no way to track the location,” Victoria, a customer service worker at Waitrose, said about her experience. She was leaving work when, not far from her flat, a white male with a black mask stole her new iPhone.
From September 2022 to August 2023, thieves stole around 57,174 phones in London. Figures show a massive increase in the last few years in personal theft and robbery of mobile phones.
The latest data from the Met Police indicated that from September 2021 to August 2022, there were around 46,289 phone robberies registered. Data from July and August 2022 shows which boroughs had the most phone snatching cases.
As is shown, Central London has the most cases, with Westminster registering almost 3000 in a month, followed by Camden with 878. There is a clear pattern of the busiest areas being most targeted by thieves in London.
Charities such as Crime Stoppers have argued that there is an urgent need for campaigns and to raise awareness and to encourage people to be mindful wherever they use their phones. According to their data, there has been an increase of 151% of mobile phone theft in 2023.
The advice of the Met Police is to try and not use your phone on busy roads and check your surroundings whenever you want to see something on your phone. They are planning to launch initiatives to help victims report incidents in a fast and efficient way in 2024.
OnlyFans and Loneliness: Is the boom of Onlyfans a result of young males under 30 being single?
“Since I joined OnlyFans, I have spent less than what I used to when I was on Tinder,” Kevan, a 28-year-old single man, affirms as he shows me his profile and how many creators he is subscribed to. He explained that using dating apps like Tinder meant not only paying the app to show up on girls’ feeds but also going out on unaffordable dates.
In America, 60% of young men consider themselves single, according to a survey by the Pew Centre last year. Concurring with similar studies, the reality data has shown there is a decline in young men being in committed relationships before their 30’s.
Simultaneously, America is the biggest market for OnlyFans, the 2016 adult content app, making up 45% of the users’ base, culminating in more than 2.5 visits a month. The USA has around a million users. Even though OnlyFans is a UK business, British users only amount to 7%. America has recorded an increase in young men referring to them as single and sexless, as Professor Gregory Matos found in his study, where he found that 30 is now the average age for men to first be intimate in America.
In 2023, the billion-dollar app OnlyFans had a presence in over 100 countries, with the top ten all being economically and socially advanced countries. The UK has 780,000 monthly user visits, followed by Canada and Australia with around 200,000 and Spain and Italy with more than 100,000 according to a study by Earthweb.
COVID impacted young people by depriving them of meeting their peers and the means to create and sustain face-to-face connections. Data shows a massive increase in online dating apps for the first half of the pandemic. However, not repeated lengthy lockdowns may have caused young men to look elsewhere for intimacy. OnlyFans emerged as an opportunity for many young women and men to create adult content on their own terms and in the safety of their homes.
Lee Taylor Onlyfans chief financial officer stated that the app was made to “revolutionise the creator economy by committing to building the safest social media platform and providing unparalleled opportunities to content creators and fans,” according to The Guardian.
Factors such as COVID lockdowns and an increasingly liberal attitude towards sex-work are part of the reason why so many young men were attracted to this app. “I still wanted to have a chance to connect with someone in the pandemic, and I found myself having so much more fun on OnlyFans without the fear of rejection,” Kevan explained.
In 2020, OnlyFans experienced its boom when young men signed up to the app to interact with adult content produced by their favourite celebrities or influencers. The app gave them the chance to not only watch their graphic content but to message and connect on a more personal level. CEO Tim Stokely said the app has already seen massive growth since January 2020, when it reached 13.5 million users. However, by May 2020, this number had doubled to 30 million, and in October it registered 75 million users, a breaking record for OnlyFans.
By the start of 2021 the app had reached its first 100 million users and ended the year with 188 million users. In the 3 years from 2019 to 2021 OnlyFans achieved a user growth rate of 1291.85%. The latest statistics show that in June 2023, they reached 210 million users.
The psychological effect of consuming pornography has on young men has been studied extensively by scholars. However, the novelty of OnlyFans and its explosion of popularity has led many to raise the question of what is behind the boom. OnlyFans’ users are overwhelmingly male (87%), while only 10% of the user base identify as female. In comparison with the recent statistics of Tinder’s demographics, there is a clear difference in target audience.
Still, it is the age and the country demographics of OnlyFans users that can provide the most insight into their psychology audience. Social isolation is a growing trend among young people, which was exacerbated by the pandemic. However, while arriving at a particular moment in time OnlyFans may not be that unique.
Craig Roberts, professor of social psychology at the University of Strilin, commented that apps like OnlyFans do influence young men, and that this latest trend of single men consuming products like OnlyFans is similar to the pornographic industry boom of the early 2000s. However, the concerning thing is how quickly OnlyFans grew over such a short timespan.
The majority of men that are subscribed to OnlyFans are under the age of 35, and according to a CiviScience survey, there is a clear growth in interest among younger men in getting an OnlyFans subscription instead of dating apps. Most men on OnlyFans perceive themselves as more attractive than average, which can directly influence their interactions with creators. However, Professor Roberts believes that pursuing one-sided, virtual connections may have a detrimental impact on young men when attempting to create meaningful relationships outside of online sites.
“To be honest, I feel lost and out of touch with the dating world. I can tell you that whenever I meet a girl in real life, I compare her with my OnlyFans subscriptions,” Kevan confessed.
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