A JERSEY forensics expert has appeared on the BBC programme Crimewatch Live which showcased her work to unmask cyber-predators and combat online child exploitation.
Dr Emily Chiang works at Aston University’s Centre for Forensic Linguistics, examining language in criminal and legal contexts, with the aim of assisting and improving the delivery of justice.
Dr Chiang, who shares her work at conferences and with police forces, pioneered research into the online habits of cyber-predators, investigating how suspected offenders communicate via hidden internet forums.
In the recently broadcast Crimewatch episode, she explained how she looked at the online language of potential criminals to learn as much as possible about them “by looking at the words on a screen”.
“Sometimes the police will approach us because they have an anonymous user of a particular forum online and they want to know who that person is, because they think they’re quite a danger to society,” she said.
“When we are trying to identify an individual, we are looking for preferences in word choice.”
Such choices can represent an individual’s “habitual language” and point to clues about the person.
These might include, for example, how many kisses are put at the end of text messages, whether words at the beginning of a phrase are capitalised, whether full stops are used and whether lines are used to divide various sections of a message.
A notable example of how forensic linguistics can identify criminals is the case of Richard Huckle, a prolific child abuser from the UK who was part of an underground abuse community on the dark web – a shadowy realm of the internet accessible only through specialised software.
Linguists working on the case at the Aston Institute detected a particular language habit used by an anonymous person in their greeting messages on dark web forums. They wrote “hiyas”.
The linguists working on the case, as Dr Chiang described on Crimewatch, also noted that “the person seemed to have knowledge of cars and came across as somebody who was [also] posting on a four-wheel-drive forum and used the same greeting – ‘hiyas’”.
This “became a really important piece of information for the police”, Dr Chiang said, leading to Huckle’s identification and eventual arrest, as well as the rescue of numerous children.
Her work also includes training police personnel for internet undercover operations, which has shown “really positive results”.
Her expertise helps police officers understand the language of the communities they seek to infiltrate, enabling them to convincingly adopt personas that suppress aspects of their own identity while understanding the language and culture of the target group.
“Training police in undercover work involves providing some key principles about how language and identity construction works in online settings, and in relation to specific individuals or communities,” she explained.
In her pioneering 2019 study, Dr Chiang analysed online web chats involving over 20 abuse victims, some as young as 12, and a man in his early 20s who pleaded guilty to over 40 charges related to grooming, blackmail, and distributing indecent images of children.
Unlike most research in this field, which relies on transcripts between offenders and adults posing as children, Dr Chiang’s study examined online instant messaging conversations between a convicted child sex offender and several of his real victims.
The study identified 19 linguistic “moves” employed by the offender, who adopted 17 fake identities with distinct characteristics. These linguistic moves ranged from building rapport and maintaining conversations to initiating discussion of sexual topics, and extortion.
Dr Chiang highlighted the common strategy of the offender, who built rapport by asking questions like “asl?” (age, sex, location) and “wuu2?” (what are you up to?) to establish relationships and trust.
She said the study also examined how the offender tried to force victims to send images or messages by threatening to distribute previously obtained pictures or videos of the victim.
“Victims were found to resort to bargaining, begging and expressing fear and vulnerability,” she explained.
