'so is your mom as cute as you?': Examining patterns of language use by online sexual groomers
Date
2019
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Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies
Abstract
Linguistic research into online grooming is scarce despite both the communicative
essence of this form of online child sexual abuse and a substantial body of literature into it
across other Social Sciences. Most of this literature has examined small data sets via
qualitative methods, primarily Thematic Analysis. This study evaluates the contribution
that a Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) approach can make to this body of
literature, with a focus on online groomers’ language. The corpus, extracted from the
Perverted Justice Foundation archive, consists of c. 3.3 million words produced by >600
convicted child sexual offenders interacting online with adult decoys whom they believed
to be children. Lexical dispersion (DPNorm), collocation and concordance analyses were
conducted. The corpus was also run through the software LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and
Word Count), which is the only other software-assisted methodology that has been
adopted to examine Perverted Justice data. Our analysis shows that LIWC may not be the
most efficient software to analyse online groomers’ language due to a lack of general
language comparison scores, the non-transparency of some of its analytic variables and a
focus on de-contextualised words. Comparatively, CADS methods can shed light upon
online groomers’ strategic use of language. They can also reveal the complex and nuanced
ways in which discourse features such as sexual explicitness/implicitness and
interpersonal (in)directness operate alongside these strategies.
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Keywords
manipulation, online exploitation, grooming, linguistic research, International Resources, Wales, language, sexual desensitisation, deceptive trust
Citation
Lorenzo-Dus, N., & Kinzel, A. (2019). So is your mom as cute as you?’: examining patterns of language use by online sexual groomers. Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies, 2(1), 1-30.