An exciting and abundant month ahead!
Later this month, on the 25th of June, Beata Pienczykowski and myself will be presenting at the University of Bedfordshire’s Annual Research Conference on:
“‘I was so afraid all you wanted from me was sex’: A corpus-assisted study in the pragmatics of manipulation in online child sexual groomers’ discourse”
Abstract: This paper applies Sorlin’s theoretical model for detecting the pragmatics of manipulative discourse (2017) to the context of online child sexual grooming. We analyse online groomers’ discourse within chatlogs from the Perverted Justice (PJ) corpus (http://www.perverted-justice.com/), to expose online groomers’ stylistic modus operandi. In our investigation, we focus on how the instrumental use of (im)politeness strategies contribute to the groomer distorting reality and fabricating child-targets’ illusion of control and free will. While recent studies have focused on the power imbalance and asymmetry between groomer and child-target as a recurring theme in online child sexual grooming discourse (Lorenzo-Dus et al, 2023; Chiang and Grant, 2017, 2018), this study’s findings show that, a seemingly ‘you-first orientation’ is typically used to mask an ego-centred, ‘I-first’, attitude reflective of the offender’s covert domination and coercive control. We find and demonstrate that forms of (im)politeness are exploited to distort reality, construct (false) identities and reverse victim and offender roles, thereby giving the so-called ‘mature’ child a fallacious sense of control and minimising the offender’s criminal responsibility. (Im)politeness strategies are used intertwiningly with other deceptive tactics, including the ubiquity of ‘truth’, ‘honesty’ and apparent transparency markers, alignment (‘we’) and stance attribution (‘you’) – what Lorenzo Dus et al. (2023) call ‘identity homogenisation’ – doublespeak, damage limitation and normalisation or ‘desensitisation to sex’ (Ibid), together forming the building blocks of the child sexual grooming genre.
Our conclusion: (Im)politeness strategies are used instrumentally in the context of belief-based manipulation giving the victim an illusion of control and free will. This more insidious side of the picture converges with the more commonly depicted traits and tactics of the online sexual offender and brings to light a more complex online groomers’ genre and stylistic modus operandi, one that is particularly effective in the early stages of the online grooming process.
#corpuspragmatics #manipulativediscourse #onlinegrooming
Find the full programme of UoB’s Annual Research Conference here – available soon.
Graduation 2023 🎉 well done, Beata!
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