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“Not right now”: Children's resistance during online grooming interactions
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Craig Evans
Journal of Pragmatics, Volume: 249, Pages: 44 - 56
Swansea University Author:
Nuria Lorenzo-Dus
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©2025 The Author(s). This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license.
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DOI (Published version): 10.1016/j.pragma.2025.08.013
Abstract
In this paper, we examine children's resistance strategies during online grooming interactions, specifically the different ways they use facework to counter groomers' advances. The study identifies types of children's discursive resistance based on established politeness and impoliten...
| Published in: | Journal of Pragmatics |
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| ISSN: | 0378-2166 1879-1387 |
| Published: |
Elsevier BV
2025
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| Online Access: |
Check full text
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| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa70399 |
| Abstract: |
In this paper, we examine children's resistance strategies during online grooming interactions, specifically the different ways they use facework to counter groomers' advances. The study identifies types of children's discursive resistance based on established politeness and impoliteness taxonomies (Brown and Levinson, 1987; and Culpeper, 2016; respectively), and quantifies the tendency for children to produce these based on evidence from a specialist corpus of 80 online grooming chatlogs, shared by UK law enforcement for research purposes. The study also examines how children perform resistance discursively as part of a dynamic interactional process. Our research finds that children produce resistance that is fairly evenly balanced between politeness and impoliteness-based types. The majority of politeness-based resistance is oriented to positive face needs, reflecting children's personal/romantic relationship goals, while children's negative politeness-based resistance is attributable to adult-child/manipulator-victim power imbalance in online grooming interactions. The majority of impoliteness-based resistance is also oriented to positive face needs, primarily acting against these through the strategy ‘Ignore, snub’, while children's negative impoliteness-based resistance tends to take the form of blocking. This is the first study to systematically identify resistance types and their discursive realization in a sizeable corpus of real online grooming chatlogs. Its findings help inform preventative technologies to counter the globally escalating problem of technology facilitated child sexual exploitation and abuse. |
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| Keywords: |
Online grooming; Discourse; Children's resistance; Pragmatics; Politeness; Impoliteness |
| College: |
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Funders: |
This work was supported by Safe Online, Tech Coalition – Safe Online Research Fund, and the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033). |
| Start Page: |
44 |
| End Page: |
56 |