A Walk in the Woods: How users plot their course through a dark web child sexual abuse forum

*This is a hybrid event taking place at Aston University and on Teams*

Title: A Walk in the Woods: How users plot their course through a dark web child sexual abuse forum

Speaker: Dr. Amy Booth (Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics)

Abstract:

The sociological study of deviance has frequently drawn on the metaphor of the career to explore how individuals progress through a series of roles or stages in order to become an established and high-status member of a deviant group (Becker, 1973; Faupel, 2011). Although analogous to professional careers, careers in deviant contexts are unconstrained by the often rigidly bureaucratic systems that structure careers in mainstream organisations. Deviant careers can therefore be compared to a ‘walk in the woods’ (Luckenbill & Best, 1981), offering individuals the freedom to set their own pace, path, and destination within the deviant milieu.

This paper presents preliminary analysis which explores the different paths that users may take through a forum dedicated to the sexual exploitation and abuse of children. As a starting point for investigating different paths, I take groups of users with careers of three different lengths, ranging from the shortest to the longest found in the forum. Across these career types, I investigate users’ first ever posts to explore how they begin to plot their course through the forum: what do these posts show us about who users want to be in the forum community? The analysis suggests that the three groups lie along a behavioural continuum, with users who will go on to have longer, higher engagement careers making more frequent claims of previous child abuse experience, and showing more interest in constructing an online identity that is simultaneously distinctive and community-oriented.

References

Becker, H. S. (1973). Outsiders: Studies in the sociology of deviance (2nd ed.). Free Press.

Faupel, C. (2011). The deviant career. In C. D. Bryant (Ed.), Routledge handbook of deviant behavior (pp. 195-202). Routledge.

Luckenbill, D. F., & Best, J. (1981). Careers in deviance and respectability: The analogy's limitations. Social Problems 29(2), 197-206.

Host or Publisher Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics