Intentional and Performative Persuasion: The Linguistic Basis for Criminalizing the (Direct and Indirect) Encouragement of Terrorism

Article 5 of the Council of Europe Convention on the Prevention of Terrorism requires member states to criminalise “public provocation to commit a terrorist offence”. In the U.K., the realisation of this obligation is found in the “Encouragement of terrorism” offence contained in section 1 of the Terrorism Act 2006. As well as fulfilling the U.K.’s treaty obligation, this offence was intended to stop the spread of violent extremist ideology. Although the compatibility of this offence with the right to freedom of expression enshrined in Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights has been queried, both the domestic courts and the European Court of Human Rights have held that it complies with Article 10’s demands. So, instead of taking Article 10 as its starting point, this article draws instead on work from the field of linguistics: namely, speech act theory (SAT). By using insights from SAT, and by examining some of the linguistic strategies that may be used to encourage acts of terrorism, the article seeks to advance the legal understanding of the concept of encouragement. In particular, the article draws out two features of encouragement that have important implications for the appropriate boundaries of the encouragement of terrorism offence - encouragement is intentional and it is performative - and argues that, as currently drafted, the offence does not reflect the nature of encouragement as an intentional activity. The article concludes by drawing out from its analysis a series of proposed amendments that together address the rights-based concerns about the offence whilst maintaining its effectiveness as a counterterrorism tool

Violence and victims: Assessing the effect of codes of conduct on representations of male schizophrenia in UK national newspapers (2013-2016)

The British press is moving towards responsible reporting through guidelines drawn up by organizations such as the National Union of Journalists (NUJ). With regard to mental health, these guidelines advise, among others, avoiding links between mental health and violence, as well as the use of stigmatizing representations. However, compliance with these recommendations is not always achieved systematically. This study adopts the discursive news values ​​analysis (DNVA) framework (Bednarek & Caple, 2017) to examine visual and textual representations of men with schizophrenia in the UK press in light of the UK's mental health guidelines. NUJ. Specifically, we analyzed the news values ​​extracted from the text and images contained in all articles about men with schizophrenia published in The Daily Mail, The Guardian, The Independent and The Metro the year before and the two years after the publication of the issue. current version of the NUJ guidelines (2014). Our results show the prevalence of four news values: consonance, negativity, personalization and positivity. These values ​​suggest a correspondence between the perpetuation of negative stereotypes associated with schizophrenia (consonance/negativity) and the more positive exploration of men's experiences with this condition (personalization/positivity). Before the guidelines were published, examples of positivity and personalization were more frequent in the texts of the four newspapers than those of consonance and negativity. However, the opposite is true after the guidelines were published. Regarding visual representations, negativity and personalization values ​​are more frequent before publication, while after publication, the frequency of consonance and negativity values ​​is similar. Our study concludes that adoption of the NUJ guidelines has been low and proposes that more sensitive representations of mental health require greater use of positive and contextual details of individuals with schizophrenia

Visual Jihad: Constructing the “Good Muslim” in Online Jihadist Magazines

Images are known to have important effects on human perception and persuasion. Jihadist groups are also known to make strategic use of emotive imagery and symbolism for persuasive ends. Yet until recently studies of the online magazines published by violent jihadist groups largely focused on their textual, not their image, content and, whilst the image content of these magazines is now the subject of a burgeoning number of studies, few of these compare the images used by different groups. This article accordingly offers a cross-group comparison, examining the image content of a total of 39 issues of five online magazines published by four different jihadist groups. Starting with a content analysis, it shows that the images’ most common focus is non-leader jihadis. Using a news values analysis, it then shows how these images of non-leader jihadis are used to visually construct the identity of a ‘good Muslim’. This construct is characterised by three traits, each corresponding to a different news value: fulfilled (personalisation); active (consonance); and, respected (prominence). Moreover, these traits are intertwined: fulfilment comes from responding actively to the call to violent jihad, which in turn promises respect. The article concludes by highlighting some subtle differences between how the news values of personalisation, consonance and prominence are realised in the different magazines, and by discussing the implications of the ‘good Muslim’ construct for efforts to develop counter-messages

‘So is your mom as cute as you?’: Examining patterns of language use in online sexual grooming of children

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; the exception being a couple of studies that have used automated software (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count - LIWC) that operates at a single-word level. 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 consists of >600 grooming chat logs taken from the Perverted Justice Foundation archive, from which the groomers’ language was extracted (c. 3.3 million words). Lexical dispersion (DPNorm), collocation and concordance analyses were conducted. The corpus was also run through LIWC. Our analysis shows that LIWC may not be the most efficient software to analyse online grooming 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 (im)explicitness and interpersonal (in)directness operate alongside these strategies

Sexual cyberbullying of minors (Online Grooming) and pandemic: Acting with language in the face of the violation of children's rights

Online grooming (OG) is a very serious social problem that violates children’s rights. Faced by it, we cannot but act quickly, forcefully and in a coordinated manner. Such action should be oriented to both OG detection and prevention. It should also be underpinned by a detailed knowledge of OG as a specific type of cyber-crime. This is where discourse analysis of OG can make a real difference. Linguistic analysis of OG has been limited to date, despite the fact that (i) manipulation tactics are key to OG and (ii) such tactics are discursive. Our work, developed during the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020-2021, examines all the OG court cases processed in Spain between 2003 and 2019. We select the sections of the court cases that reproduce interactional fragments between groomer and child-target. We analyse the manipulation tactics in the groomers’ discourse and how these tactics are perceived by their child-targets. Our results show recurrent tactics in OG discourse such as the use of compliments and the combination of implicit and explicit sexual language

The discursive representation of online grooming in children’s accounts within child help line contexts

This article pioneers analysis of children’s experiences of Online Child Sexual Grooming (OCSG) as relayed to counsellors at a child helpline in Spain. The data comprises the transcribed record of all the child-counsellor telephone conversations about OCSG made to Fundación ANAR’s child helpline service between 2013-2019 2019 in Spain (81 conversations, 34,102 words). The analysis uses a discourse-based model of OCSG (Lorenzo-Dus et al. 2020; Lorenzo-Dus 2023), centring on children’s interpretation of offenders’ manipulative tactics of entrapment as well as children’s communicative behaviour during the OCSG process. Our analysis shows that children’s discourse about OCSG generated within the counselling context focuses on the groomers’ tactics of sexual gratification (26%) and deceptive trust development (32%), and the children’s behaviour of trust development (43%) and further contact (28%). These findings suggest that, when relaying their experience of OCSG to a counsellor, many children feel they are/were in a relationship, including a romantic relationship. The findings also reveal some of the complex relational work that groomers perform during OCSG and its impact on the children they prey on. Children’s accounts of perceived sextortion are articulated around groomers’ impoliteness strategies of causing fear and invasion of their digital privacy (Culpeper 1996; Mullineux-Morgan and Lorenzo-Dus 2021). This study contributes to a better understanding of the child’s communicative processes of entrapment through mainstreaming their own voice, which is novel in studies on OCSG in general and, in the case of Spanish data in particular. Importantly, and from an applied research perspective, our findings may be used to inform the ongoing development of targeted interventions against OCSG for professionals in child-safeguarding roles, such as police officers, social workers, and educators