The communicative modus operandi of online child sexual groomers: Recurring patterns in their language use

Online child sexual groomers manipulate their targets into partaking in sexual activity online and, in some cases, offline. To do so they use language (and other semiotic means, such as images) strategically. This study uses a Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies methodology to identify recurring patterns in online groomers' language use, mapping them to the specific grooming goal that their use in context fulfils. The analysis of the groomers' language (c. 3.3 million words) within 622 conversations from the Perverted Justice website newly identifies 70 such recurring linguistic patterns (three-word collocations), as well as their relative strength of association to one or more grooming goals. The results can be used to inform computational models for detecting online child sexual grooming language. They can also support the development of training resources that raise awareness of typical language structures that characterise online sexual groomers' communicative modus operandi. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.