Abstract
Abstract This article provides a case study of deceptive online identity performance by a convicted child sex offender. Most prior linguistic and psychological research into online sexual abuse analyses transcripts involving adult decoys posing as children. In contrast, our data comprise genuine online conversations between the offender and 20 victims. Using move analysis (Swales 1981, 1990), we explore the offender’s numerous presented personas. The offender’s use of rhetorical moves is investigated, as is the extent to which the frequency and structure of these moves contribute to and discriminate between the various online personas he adopts. We find from eight frequently adopted personas that two divergent identity positions emerge: the sexual pursuer/aggressor, performed by the majority of his online personas, and the friend/boyfriend, performed by a single persona. Analysis of the offender’s self-describing assertives suggests this distinctive persona shares most attributes with the offender’s ‘home identity’. This article importantly raises the question of whether move analysis might be useful in identifying the ‘offline persona’ in cases where offenders are known to operate multiple online personas in the pursuit of child victims.
Highlights
This study concerns the case of a man convicted of sexual offences against children after pleading guilty to 45 charges related to grooming and blackmailing young females online, and distributing indecent images of children over a 14-month period between 2009 and 2011
We wish to consider how the moves observed in this particular data set compare with themes reported in other research in online child sexual abuse (CSA) conversations, because this study is one of a small minority making use of naturally occurring data concerning conversations between an offender and genuine child victims
These 20 interactions fall into the category of online child abuse conversations, and many of the observed moves overlap with the data studied in Chiang and Grant (2017) and echo findings from O’Connell (2003), Williams et al (2013), Kloess et al (2014), Black et al (2015), and Winters et al (2017), among others
Summary
This study concerns the case of a man convicted of sexual offences against children after pleading guilty to 45 charges related to grooming and blackmailing young females online, and distributing indecent images of children over a 14-month period between 2009 and 2011. The offender was in his early 20s and befriended both male and female victims before coercing them into providing indecent images of themselves and/or engaging in other sexual activities via webcam. Such practices are widely seen as forming part of the processes of sexual grooming and sexual extortion (O’Connell 2003; Whittle et al 2013; Acar 2016; Kopecky 2016, 2017). This article investigates the offender’s deliberate and deceptive identity performance by analysing 20 transcripts from instant messaging (IM) interactions between the offender and 20 different victims The research hopes to offer useful insights into deceptive identity performance in the context of online sex abuse conversations and show how such linguistic analysis might usefully contribute to police investigative strategies
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