The University of South Australia (UniSA) is teaming up with South Australia Police (SAPOL) to protect children from online predators by using language analysis to monitor, identify and apprehend suspects.
Program Director at UniSA Education Futures, Enza Tudini said the new research project would investigate the language and behaviours that online predators used to gain unacquainted children’s trust during opening chat sequences.
Dr Tudini said the research team would work with SAPOL to identify the typical and recurrent behaviour patterns used by offenders in both initial online contact and preliminary nonsexual interactions, using conversations with undercover police posing as children online.
She said the findings would deliver new linguistic indicators to help better monitor, identify and apprehend suspects.
“This research will help identify how predators gain children’s trust in the very early stages of online interaction” Dr Tudini said.
“By tracking and examining these online conversations we will deliver empirical information that can inform child protection authorities and contribute to educate children and protective adults on this type of online abuse,” she said.
Officer in Charge of Special Crimes Investigation Section at SAPOL, Detective Chief Inspector, Richard Lambert said the research could help prevent online child abuse.
“Children are accessing the internet at a very young age, often unsupervised and spend long hours using electronic devices to socialise on the internet,” Detective Chief Inspector Lambert said.
“SAPOL is supportive of this type of research, which may assist investigators to identify online groomers and intervene at the earliest opportunity and may assist in preventing some instances of online child abuse,” he said.
Dr Tudini said the study would commence this month (December).
