'so is your mom as cute as you?': Examining patterns of language use by online sexual groomers

Date

2019

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

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.

Description

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.

DOI