“ cause ur special ”: Understanding trust and complimenting behaviour in online grooming discourse

Abstract

Online Grooming is the process whereby an adult gains the trust of a minor in order to exploit him/ her, through the use of cyber-technology. Despite a global increase in online sexual exploitation, research into online grooming is scant, especially from a linguistic perspective. Our study examines online groomers' attempts at gaining their targets' trust through compliments. This focus is justified by the fact that, although praise is known to be used regularly in online and offline grooming, its linguistic realisation via the speech act of complimenting has not been analysed to date. We analyse the topics, syntactic realisation patterns and discourse functions of a corpus of 1268 compliments extracted from 68 online grooming interactions. The results point to (1) a prevalence of compliments about physical appearance, of both a sexual and a non-sexual orientation, which increases alongside speed of grooming; (2) high syntactic formulaicity levels regardless of speed of grooming; and (3) use of compliments to frame and support online grooming processes that seek to isolate the targets, provide the online groomers' with sexual gratification and enable them to gauge the targets' compliance levels. Overall, the results both provide new insights into the speech act of complimenting from a hitherto unexamined communicative context and contribute to understanding the communicative process of online grooming.

A psycho-linguistic profile of online grooming conversations: A comparative study of prison and police staff considerations

“…Chat logs held in the OGCP database were selected based upon two criteria of the contributor: being active at point of data collection and having a minimum of ten chat logs in their personal archive (Lorenzo-Dus & Izura, 2017). From this list, eight contributors were randomly selected.…”

Child porn offenders, solicitation offenders and child sexual abusers: what the literature has to say

“…Some offenders move immediately into soliciting sexual contact online or offline thereby skipping the grooming process altogether. 193,231,232 Several theories of grooming will be discussed. The communication strategies used focus on whether the offender is fantasy-driven (keeping the sexual contact online) or contact-driven (expecting to engage in physical and sexual contact with the victim).…”

“…233 Direct strategies offenders may use include offering money in exchange for sex or may offer a long-term relationship. 233,240,241 Other strategies may encourage a greater affective involvement by the victim 232,239,242 which serves to sustain the abusive relationship over time. Bribery may be used to offer free photo sessions to find work that is to expose their bodies to be selected in areas of fashion or movies.…”

“…166,195,205 Complements often focused on sexual physical appearance and nonsexual appearance, then personal compliments. 232 Seeking information about the child's sexual interests and experiences is also useful in establishing compliance with sexual requests. 194 Secrecy, establishing a sense of mutuality, and a sense of a relationship also help to ensure the child's compliance.…”

Data on fantasy vs contact driven internet-initiated sexual offences: Study selection, appraisal and characteristics

“…Pearson correlations examined relationships between grooming processes. Lorenzo-Dus and Izura [15] A Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis approach was undertaken. Praise was examined using Speech Act Theory (SAT – complimenting behaviour).…”