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

Lorenzo-Dus, Nuria and Kinzel, Anina 2019. 'So is your mom as cute as you?': Examining patterns of language use in online sexual grooming of children. Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies 2 , pp. 15-39. 10.18573/jcads.31

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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; 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.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	English, Communication and Philosophy
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA76 Computer software Z Bibliography. Library Science. Information Resources > ZA Information resources > ZA4450 Databases
Publisher:	Cardiff University Press
ISSN:	2515-0251
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	5 August 2019
Date of Acceptance:	8 March 2019
Last Modified:	03 May 2023 13:20
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/124676

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