Characterizing Pedophile Conversations on the Internet using Online Grooming

Cyber-crime targeting children such as online pedophile activity are a major and a growing concern to society. A deep understanding of predatory chat conversations on the Internet has implications in designing effective solutions to automatically identify malicious conversations from regular conversations. We believe that a deeper understanding of the pedophile conversation can result in more sophisticated and robust surveillance systems than majority of the current systems relying only on shallow processing such as simple word-counting or key-word spotting. In this paper, we study pedophile conversations from the perspective of online grooming theory and perform a series of linguistic-based empirical analysis on several pedophile chat conversations to gain useful insights and patterns. We manually annotated 75 pedophile chat conversations with six stages of online grooming and test several hypothesis on it. The results of our experiments reveal that relationship forming is the most dominant online grooming stage in contrast to the sexual stage. We use a widely used word-counting program (LIWC) to create psycho-linguistic profiles for each of the six online grooming stages to discover interesting textual patterns useful to improve our understanding of the online pedophile phenomenon. Furthermore, we present empirical results that throw light on various aspects of a pedophile conversation such as probability of state transitions from one stage to another, distribution of a pedophile chat conversation across various online grooming stages and correlations between pre-defined word categories and online grooming stages

Online Sexual Predator Detection

Online sexual abuse is a concerning yet severely overlooked vice of modern society. With more children being on the Internet and with the ever-increasing advent of web-applications such as online chatrooms and multiplayer games, preying on vulnerable users has become more accessible for predators. In recent years, there has been work on detecting online sexual predators using Machine Learning and deep learning techniques. Such work has trained on severely imbalanced datasets, and imbalance is handled via manual trimming of over-represented labels. In this work, we propose an approach that first tackles the problem of imbalance and then improves the effectiveness of the underlying classifiers. Our evaluation of the proposed sampling approach on PAN benchmark dataset shows performance improvements on several classification metrics, compared to prior methods that otherwise require hands-crafted sampling of the data

Detecting child grooming behaviour patterns on social media

Online paedophile activity in social media has become a major concern in society as Internet access is easily available to a broader younger population. One common form of online child exploitation is child grooming, where adults and minors exchange sexual text and media via social media platforms. Such behaviour involves a number of stages performed by a predator (adult) with the final goal of approaching a victim (minor) in person. This paper presents a study of such online grooming stages from a machine learning perspective. We propose to characterise such stages by a series of features covering sentiment polarity, content, and psycho-linguistic and discourse patterns. Our experiments with online chatroom conversations show good results in automatically classifying chatlines into various grooming stages. Such a deeper understanding and tracking of predatory behaviour is vital for building robust systems for detecting grooming conversations and potential predators on social media

Dark side of information systems and protection of children online: examining predatory behavior and victimization of children within social media

Protecting children online from sexual predators has been a focus of research in psychiatry, sociology, computer science, and information systems (IS) for many years. However, the anonymity afforded by social media has made finding a solution to the problem of child protection difficult. Pedophiles manipulate conversation (discourse) with children in social media in order to exercise power, control and coercion over children leading to their psychological and often physical victimization. Recent IS research points to "individuals, groups, and organizations that have been transformed - in intended and unintended ways - by technology" (Dang and Brown 2010, p. 2). This research examines a darker side of social media that demonstrates unintended consequences that are negatively transforming and affecting lives of children who fall victim to predatory coercion. There is a critical need for information systems research to investigate and understand how sexual predators victimize children online. The knowledge gained could help society as a whole to develop interventions to better protect children online, enabling them to use valuable online resources for education, social development and becoming better citizens in the future. In this context, this dissertation contributes to the larger research narrative of information systems and critical social issues. This dissertation comprises three studies. Study 1 addresses how online sexual predators use social media, as a discursive system, to propagate their ideology of acceptance of sexual acts between adults and children. Study 2 addresses how online sexual predators use and manipulate the text of institutional logics within negotiated cyber-social realities to victimize children. Study 3 examines how online sexual predators use text to construct and control negotiated cyber-social realities during the online victimization of children. Across these three studies we examined how online sexual predators used computer-mediated communications to coerce and victimize children within social media. This research introduces: (1) critical discourse analysis in information systems research to critically examine the role of social media in society, (2) an example of a mixed methods research combining critical discourse analysis, structured content analysis and grounded theory approach for the development of theory in social media and, (3) the use of institutional logics to examine social media phenomena. The central contribution of this dissertation is the development of theoretical models that uncover ways in which power relations and effects of pedophilic ideology are manifested in language and discourse between pedophiles and children in social media. The resulting theoretical models of: (1) pedophilic ideology manifestation, coercion and victimization of children in social media, (2) cyber-victimization logic and, (3) negotiated cyber-social realities provide the foundation for further research, social intervention and policy formulation that lead to better protection of children in social media. Additionally, we present a matrix of predatory coercion and victimization of children within social media that aggregates the results of all three studies. This dissertation aims to contribute beyond the traditional focus of IS research on business and organizations, leveraging the wealth of knowledge from IS research to positively impact societal causes that affect the lives of millions of our fellow citizens - in this particular research - millions of children that are the most vulnerable population in our society. These contributions aim to empower the powerless and expose power abuse as expressed in coercion of children leading to their victimization

Deceptive identity performance:Offender moves and multiple identities in online child abuse conversations

This article provides a case study of deceptive online identity performance by a convicted child sex offender. Most prior linguistic and psychological research into online sexual abuse analyses transcripts involving adult decoys posing as children. In contrast, our data comprise genuine online conversations between the offender and 20 victims. Using move analysis (Swales 1981, 1990), we explore the offender’s numerous presented personas. The offender’s use of rhetorical moves is investigated, as is the extent to which the frequency and structure of these moves contribute to and discriminate between the various online personas he adopts. We find from eight frequently adopted personas that two divergent identity positions emerge: the sexual pursuer/aggressor, performed by the majority of his online personas, and the friend/boyfriend, performed by a single persona. Analysis of the offender’s self-describing assertives suggests this distinctive persona shares most attributes with the offender’s ‘home identity’. This article importantly raises the question of whether move analysis might be useful in identifying the ‘offline persona’ in cases where offenders are known to operate multiple online personas in the pursuit of child victims

Online grooming:moves and strategies

Using transcripts of chatroom grooming interactions, this paper explores and evaluates the usefulness of Swales’ (1981) move analysis framework in contributing to the current understanding of online grooming processes. The framework is applied to seven transcripts of grooming interactions taken from perverted-justice.com. The paper presents 14 identified rhetorical moves used in chatroom grooming and explores the broad structures that grooming conversations take by presenting these structures as colour-coded visualisations which we have termed “move maps”. It also examines how some individual linguistic features are used to realise a single move termed “Assessing and Managing Risk”. The findings suggest that move analysis can usefully contribute in two key ways: determining communicative functions associated with 'grooming language' and the visualisation of variation between grooming interactions

Do they all act the same? : identification of the strategies associated with different types of online sex solicitors' discourses

L’avancement des technologies a permis aux agresseurs sexuels de mineurs d’avoir de nouvelles opportunités de commettre des infractions à caractère sexuel en ligne (Fortin, Paquette, & Dupont, 2018; Seto, Hanson, & Babchishin, 2011). Avec un nombre de plaintes criminelles croissant (Wolak, Finkelhor, & Mitchell, 2012), le phénomène du leurre informatique pose de nombreux défis pour les enquêteurs qui doivent développer des méthodes d'enquête pour distinguer les dossiers ayant le plus de risque de passage à l’acte afin d’assurer la protection du public. Le projet de recherche vise à distinguer les différents types de cyber-relations basées sur les stratégies utilisées dans les discours d’auteurs de leurre. En analysant les différences entre les auteurs de leurre qui ne demande pas un contact hors ligne, ceux qui n’ont pas été capables d’obtenir un contact et ceux qui ont obtenu un contact hors ligne, on vise à identifier les stratégies associées aux discoures des interactions menant aux contacts hors ligne. L’étude utilise une combinaison d’approche qualitative et quantitative. L’analyse des conversations en ligne a été faite à partir de données policières de la Surêté du Québec . La transformation des données qualitatives en quantitative a été fait pour conduire les analyses statistiques. Les résultats suggèrent que les stratégies associées aux interactions qui ont mené au passage hors ligne sont : la persistance, la pratique en ligne des fantaisies sexuelles et d’avoir des opportunités à risque limité de détection d’une figure faisant autorité. Les auteurs de leurre avec contact ont utilisé ces stratégies de manière plus récurrente que les auteurs de leurre sans contact. En outre, les victimes qui participent plus et qui résistent le plus ont été associées à des relations menant au contact hors ligne. Les auteurs de leurre ayant eu un contact hors ligne avec leurs victimes avaient un plus grand nombre de conversations, en moyenne. Donc, ils avaient plus de temps pour utiliser différentes stratégies pour surpasser les résistances des victimes. Les implications de cette recherche suggèrent que les typologies identifiées dans la littérature scientifique n’ont pas trouver les caractéristiques scientifiquement associées à chacun des types.The advancement of technology created new opportunities for online sex solicitors to cyber victimize minors online (Fortin et al., 2018; Seto et al., 2011). With the increasing number of police reports (Wolak et al., 2012), online sex solicitors pose numerous challenges for police practices. This research project aims to distinguish the differences between the types of interactions that seek offline contact based on the strategies seen in their discourses. By analyzing the differences between the strategies used by various types of interactions, we aimed to identify the strategies which are associated with offline contact interaction group. This study used a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods to achieve the research goal. We used a qualitative methodology to do a thematic analysis and codify the chatlogs. The strategies used for codification were taken from previous studies and observation of the police data from the Sûreté du Québec . After the codification, we transformed the thematic results into quantitative data. The quantitative research methodology was employed to test the differences in frequency of each strategy between types of interactions. The results demonstrate that the strategies associated with offline contact are persistence, fantasy rehearsal and the presence of opportunities with limited risk of exposure. Contact group used more frequently these strategies compared to the noncontact group. Moreover, contact victims showed more participatory and oppositional behaviours. Offenders who met their victims offline showed longer interactions, on average. Consequentially, offenders from the contact group had more time to use the various strategies to surpass the victims' resistances. The implication of this research lays in the contradiction of these results compared to literature's results. The particularities of each types are not associated with previous typologies

Online child sexual offending: psychological characteristics of offenders and the process of exploitation

Background and Objectives: The rise in cases of online child sexual exploitation has become a global problem. Understanding both the psychological profiles of this offender group and the strategies employed during the process of exploitation, is crucial for aiding prevention and detection of these crimes as well as informing treatment and educational programmes. Thus, there were two main aims of the thesis. Firstly, a systematic review was conducted to investigate the psychological characteristics of online child sexual offenders (OCSO). Secondly, research was carried out to examine the utility of a pre-existing process model of grooming in the online sexual exploitation of children (O'Connell, 2003). Methodology: A systematic search of papers published between 2006 and 2016 was carried out. Those eligible for inclusion measured psychological characteristics using psychometric tools. A quality checklist was designed to appraise the methodological robustness of each paper. For the research study, qualitative content analysis of 63 online chat logs between offenders and children was undertaken. Logs were initially coded for correspondence to stages and strategies outlined by O'Connell, and additional codes assigned to themed text that did not fit this model. Results: The systematic review revealed fourteen papers for inclusion, and collective strengths and weaknesses were identified. Compared to contact offenders, few differences in psychological characteristics were identified; however tentative evidence suggests that online offenders experience greater interpersonal deficits whilst contact offenders present with more antisocial difficulties. Qualitative content analysis of chat logs revealed partial support for O'Connell's model. Several offender strategies proposed to take place during the sexual stage were evidenced. However, no logs showed evidence of all six stages. Additional offender strategies identified included flattery and minimising their behaviour. Various child strategies were identified, with children refusing all sexual advances in the majority of logs (n=34). Conclusions: Generic sexual offender treatment packages may not best meet the needs of OCSO. An alternative is discussed. Future research should focus on the development of psychometric tools for use with OCSO. Offenders appear heterogeneous in their approach to online sexual exploitation of children. Effective educational programmes must emphasise the speed at which many offenders will introduce sexual content, for whom traditional notions of grooming do not apply