Digital Grooming
Nuria Lorenzo-Dus
Abstract
Abstract This book examines digital grooming as a discourse manipulation practice in digital spaces that are situated at, or beyond, the boundaries of law. It identifies and examines in detail the online discourse of adults’ luring of children for sexual abuse and exploitation (digital sexual grooming), extreme ideology groups’ aligning others to their views (digital ideological grooming), and drug dealers’ transactional endeavors in crypto markets (digital commercial grooming). Style and stance analyses of large and varied datasets reveal that digital sexual, ideological, and commercial groomers’ practices have more in common than not. Three stances—expertise, openness, and avidity—scaffold their manipulative work, which relies upon and constructs identity homogenization. Digital groomers’ discourse seeks to construct them and their targets as inhabiting a perfectly aligned ideological, affective, and overall identity space. The better aligned they are, the more likely it is that they will see themselves as being misaligned from other equally homogenously constructed, identities: their opponents. The findings of this book can inform practitioner-based attempts at countering digital grooming, including development of detection software and prevention-focused training resources.