The Language of Online Child Sexual Groomers - A Corpus Assisted Discourse Study of Intentions, Requests and Grooming Duration

Online grooming has become a wide-spread and worryingly fast increasing issue in society. This thesis analyses a corpus of online grooming communication, made available by the Perverted Justice (PJ) archive, a non-profit organisation that from 2004 until 2019 employed volunteers, who pretended to be children and entered chat rooms to catch and convict groomers, collaborating with law enforcement. The archive consists of 622 grooming chat logs and approx. 3.7 million words of groomer language. A corpus of this database was built, and a Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) approach used to analyse the language therein. Specifically, the language was compared to a reference corpus of general chat language data (PAN2012) and duration of online grooming and manipulative requesting behaviour were also investigated. The following research questions were answered: 1)What are the features of a corpus of online groomer language compared to that of a general digital chat language reference corpus? Is online groomer language distinct? How are online grooming intentions realised linguistically by online groomers?2)Does duration of grooming influence the grooming process/intentions? Is usage of specific words/specific grooming intentions associated with different duration of grooming? Can different duration profiles be established and, if so, what are the cut-off points for these duration profiles?3)How are requests realised in online grooming and how does duration influence this? How do groomers make requests and what support move functions do they use? Does duration influence how requests are made, and the type of support move function that are used?The thesis newly identifies nuanced linguistic realisations of groomers’ intentions and strategies, proposing a new working terminology for discourse-based models of online grooming. This is based on a review of the literature followed by an empirical analysis refining this terminology, which has not been done before. It finds evidence for two distinct duration-based grooming approaches and yields a fine-grained qualitative analysis of groomer requests, also influenced by grooming duration. There have only been very few studies using a CADS analysis of such a large dataset of groomer language and this thesis will lead to new insights, implications and significance for the successful analysis, detection and prevention of online grooming

‘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

Daesh, Twitter and the social media ecosystem: a study of outlinks contained in tweets mentioning Rumiyah

The presence of Daesh (also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, ISIS) on Twitter has greatly diminished over the past five years as Daesh’s propaganda dissemination strategy has evolved. Yet some Daesh supporters have persevered in their use of Twitter, using throwaway accounts to share outlinks to pro-Daesh materials on other platforms. Stuart Macdonald, Daniel Grinnell, Anina Kinzel and Nuria Lorenzo-Dus analyse 892 outlinks found in 11,520 tweets that contained the word Rumiyah (Daesh’s online magazine). They evaluate Twitter’s response to attempts to use its platform to signpost users to Rumiyah in the context of the wider social media ecosystem and highlight the role played by botnet activity in efforts to disseminate the magazine and the impact of traditional news media coverage