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

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dc.contributor.authorLorenzo-Dus, N., & Kinzel, A.
dc.date.accessioned2019-07-31T18:55:52Z
dc.date.available2019-07-31T18:55:52Z
dc.date.issued2019
dc.description.abstractLinguistic 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.en_US
dc.identifier.citationLorenzo-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.en_US
dc.identifier.urihttps://jcads.cardiffuniversitypress.org/articles/31/galley/22/download/
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/11212/4428
dc.language.isoenen_US
dc.publisherJournal of Corpora and Discourse Studiesen_US
dc.subjectmanipulationen_US
dc.subjectonline exploitationen_US
dc.subjectgroomingen_US
dc.subjectlinguistic researchen_US
dc.subjectInternational Resourcesen_US
dc.subjectWalesen_US
dc.subjectlanguageen_US
dc.subjectsexual desensitisationen_US
dc.subjectdeceptive trusten_US
dc.title'so is your mom as cute as you?': Examining patterns of language use by online sexual groomersen_US
dc.typeArticleen_US

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