Presented at the Society of Evidence Based Policing (SEBP) Conference, Milton Keynes, 2018

1. Detecting online grooming
and radicalisation
Harith Alani
http://people.kmi.open.ac.uk/harith/
@halani
harith-alani
@halaniSEBP Conference, Open University, 1st March Feb 2018

2. Social
Analytics

3. RadicalisationGrooming

4. Child Grooming
Premeditated behaviour intending to secure
the trust of a minor as a first step towards
future engagement in sexual conduct.

5. Claire Lilley, Ruth Ball, Heather Vernon, The experiences of 11-16 year olds on social networking sites, NSPCC 2014
“findings show
that approximately
190,000 UK children
(1 in 58) will suffer contact
sexual abuse by a non-
related adult before turning
18, with approximately
10,000 new child victims of
contact sexual abuse being
reported in the UK each
year.”
CEOP: Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre
NSPCC - National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children

6. “50% of all 11 and 12 year-olds in
the UK use a social networking
site, according to our research.
This is because it's easy for
children to access sites intended
for older users.”
https://www.nspcc.org.uk/preventing-abuse/keeping-children-safe/share-aware/

7. https://www.statista.com/statistics/271348/facebook-users-in-the-united-kingdom-uk-by-age/

8. Child Protection Tools
Passive Tools
ActiveTools

9. Notes about Grooming!
• From April 2017, sexual communications with a child is a criminal
offence
• At any moment, there are around 750,000 predators active online
(International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children, 2017)
• On average, grooming conversations consist of over 2000 lines and
17000 words, spanning many weeks and month (Gupta et al. 2012)
• Increasing children’s awareness and understanding of online
grooming behaviour is key to protecting children online (Izura et al.
2017)
• Most people are unable to identify predatory behaviours when they
are present (Winters & Jeglic, 2017)

10. Online Grooming
https://www.thinkuknow.co.uk/parents/articles/Online-grooming/

11. Signs of Online Grooming
https://www.thinkuknow.co.uk/14_plus/Need-advice/Online-grooming/

12. Predator: hey whats up?…
Predator: I like your pic, very cute
Predator: so you're in san diego?
13-yr-old-girl: not far
Predator: ok, you like older guys?
13-yr-old-girl: thers nice or bad ppl all ages
Predator: have some pics if you want to see
Predator: do your parents look on your computer?
Predator: so are you by yourself or is someone else there with you?
Predator: so it should just be us, our little secret
Predator: so have you ever snuck out?
13-yr-old-girl: not rlly lol
Predator: yeah, what about tonight?
Predator: think you could sneak out tonight?
Predator: well if the wrong person found out then I'd be screwed
13-yr-old-girl: im not a teller lol
Predator: I know, just wouldn't want your dad to find out
Predator: if you are still up why not sneak out for a few minutes
Predator: but that's the fun of it
13-yr-old-girl: fun to sneak?
Predator: yes
Predator: so your dad doesn't know
Predator: would take a nap but I leave for bible study around 6:30
Predator: I know I'm bad, going to bible study and talking about sex with you
Predator: yeah, there's nothing wrong with us being friends, we have the same lord remember ;)
Predator: would take me like an hour and a half to get there
Predator: see you in a little while
Grooming in Action
~700 message
Over a 5 month
period
Full conversation: http://www.perverted-justice.com/?archive=bravesfan34581
Content blocking
unhelpful

13. Olson’s Theory of Luring
Communication
Olson, L. N., Daggs, J. L., Ellevold, B. L. and Rogers, T. K. K. (2007), Entrapping the Innocent: Toward a
Theory of Child Sexual Predators’ Luring Communication. Communication Theory, 17: 231–251

14. Predator: hey whats up?…
Predator: I like your pic, very cute
Predator: so you're in san diego?
13-yr-old-girl: not far
Predator: ok, you like older guys?
13-yr-old-girl: thers nice or bad ppl all ages
Predator: have some pics if you want to see
Predator: do your parents look on your computer?
Predator: so are you by yourself or is someone else there with you?
Predator: so it should just be us, our little secret
Predator: so have you ever snuck out?
13-yr-old-girl: not rlly lol
Predator: yeah, what about tonight?
Predator: think you could sneak out tonight?
Predator: well if the wrong person found out then I'd be screwed
13-yr-old-girl: im not a teller lol
Predator: I know, just wouldn't want your dad to find out
Predator: if you are still up why not sneak out for a few minutes
Predator: but that's the fun of it
13-yr-old-girl: fun to sneak?
Predator: yes
Predator: so your dad doesn't know
Predator: would take a nap but I leave for bible study around 6:30
Predator: I know I'm bad, going to bible study and talking about sex with you
Predator: yeah, there's nothing wrong with us being friends, we have the same lord remember ;)
Predator: would take me like an hour and a half to get there
Predator: see you in a little while
Approach
Grooming
Trust
Development
Isolation
Physical
Approach
Physical
Approach

15. Predator: hey whats up?…
Predator: I like your pic, very cute
Predator: so you're in san diego?
13-yr-old-girl: not far
Predator: ok, you like older guys?
13-yr-old-girl: thers nice or bad ppl all ages
Predator: have some pics if you want to see
Predator: do your parents look on your computer?
Predator: so are you by yourself or is someone else there with you?
Predator: so it should just be us, our little secret
Predator: so have you ever snuck out?
13-yr-old-girl: not rlly lol
Predator: yeah, what about tonight?
Predator: think you could sneak out tonight?
Predator: well if the wrong person found out then I'd be screwed
13-yr-old-girl: im not a teller lol
Predator: I know, just wouldn't want your dad to find out
Predator: if you are still up why not sneak out for a few minutes
Predator: but that's the fun of it
13-yr-old-girl: fun to sneak?
Predator: yes
Predator: so your dad doesn't know
Predator: would take a nap but I leave for bible study around 6:30
Predator: I know I'm bad, going to bible study and talking about sex with you
Predator: yeah, there's nothing wrong with us being friends, we have the same lord remember ;)
Predator: would take me like an hour and a half to get there
Predator: see you in a little while
Approach
Grooming
Isolation
Physical
Approach
Physical
Approach
Can we automatically
identify these stages?
Trust
Development

16. Identifying Grooming Stages
“think you could sneak out tonight?“
Grooming
Trust
Development
Physical
Approach
other
Automatic Classifiers
Yes NoNoNo

17. Dataset
• 50 transcripts of conversations between convicted predators and
volunteers who posed as minors
• Conversations vary between 83 to 12K lines.
• Each predator line manually labelled by two annotators.
• Annotations labels: 1)Trust development, 2) Grooming, 3) Seek
physical approach, 4) Other.
Trust Dev. Grooming Phys. Approach Other
1225 3304 2700 3304sentences
Dataset

18. Processing Chat Text
• Challenges in processing chat-room conversations
– Use of irregular and ill-formed words.
– Use of chat slang and teen-lingo
– Use of emoticons.
Generated a list of over 1K terms and definitions:
Chat term Translation Emoticon Translation
ASLP Age, sex, location, picture :’-( I’m crying
AWGTHTHTTA Are we going to have to
go through this again?
o/o High five
BRB Be right back @_@ I’m tired, trying to stay
awake
CWOT Complete waste of time ( ‘}{‘ ) kiss

19. Analysis Features & Results
Results - with all features:
Feature Description
N-gram word combinations extracted from text (N=1,2,3)
Part-of-speech tagging noun, verb, adjective, plural, etc.
sentiment average sentiment of terms in sentence
length number of words in sentence
Psycho-linguistic
Patterns
62 psycho-linguistic patterns in English (swearing, sexual,
agreement, etc.) - Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC)
Semantic frames Type of event, relation, or entity in text, e.g., secrecy,
desirability, emotion, kinship - SEMAFOR
Trust
Development
Grooming Phys. Approach average
Precision 79.2% 87.6% 87.2% 84.7%
Recall 82.3% 88.8% 88.7% 86.6%
F1 80.7% 88.2% 87.9% 85.6%
Cano, E; Miriam, F.; and Alani, H (2014). Detecting child grooming behaviour patterns on social media. SocInfo, Barcelona, Spain.

20. “child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA) affects
all sections of society and in particular requires a
response which incorporates protecting the
potential victims of these crimes.“
NCA report 2016-17
http://www.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/publications/814-national-crime-agency-annual-report-2016-17/

21. Date, event, location 21
Online
Radicalisation
Is the process by
which individuals are
introduced to
ideological messages
and belief systems that
encourage movement
from mainstream
beliefs toward extreme
views, primarily
through the use of
online media
[US Dept. of Justice]

22. 22

23. Distribution of Offline & Online ISIS
Activists in Europe

24. Research on Online Radicalisation
24
Mapping ISIS media command [Winter 2015]
Network of female ISIS supporters and wives of Western foreign
fighters [Klausen 2015]
ISIS’s social media presence
ISIS online recruitment steps [Berger 2015]
Stages of radicalization
Journey to violent-radicalisation [Bartlett et al 2010]
In-group peer pressure
Exist on the fringes of the community
Identify crisis Distribution of jihad videos
Shallow conception of Islam
Network of ISIS official accounts, 2014 [Berger and Morgan
2015]
Radicalisation models [King & Taylor 2011]

25. Identifying Signals of Radicalization
• Automatic approaches for detecting radicalised
individuals on social media
Machine Learning ApproachesLexicon-based Approaches
Stance Label
‫اﻟﺧﻼﻓﺔ‬ ‫دوﻟﺔ‬
ISIS
Shirk
Caliphate
Islamic State
‫ارھﺎب‬
Radicalization
Lexicon

26. Knowledge Graphs
• Extract and use the semantic interdependencies and relations
between words to learn patterns of radicalisation.
x xSyria ISIS'(ISIL)
Abu'Bakr'Al1Baghdadi
birthPlace leader
Muslim_Brotherhood_
of_Syria
ideology ideology
Pan1Islamism
Military_intervention_against_ISIL
rdf1schema#seeAlsoplace
location
headquarters
ISIS
Syria
Terrorism Group
Country
(Military Intervention Against ISIS, place, Syria)
Entities Concepts Semantic Relations

27. Automatic classification of social media
accounts
Machine Learning
Algorithm Non-violent Radical
Non-Radical
Violent Radical

28. Kurdish
Jihadist
Pro-Assad
Secular/
Moderate
Fig. 1: Syrian account network (652 nodes, 3,260 edges). Four major categories; Jihadist (gold, right), Kurdish (red, top),
Pro-Assad (purple, left), and Secular/Moderate opposition (blue, center). Black nodes are members of multiple communities.
Visualization was performed with the OpenOrd layout in Gephi.
contrast with the polarization analyzed in certain studies of
mainstream political activism [3], [10], the three communities
found few references to these from the liberal and conservative
blogs), but suggested that they could be considered in future
O’Callaghan et al. 2014
625 Users
2.4M Users
154K EU Users
104M Tweets
Sharing Incitement Material
Using Extremist Language
566 pro-ISIS users 566 anti-ISIS or
neutral users
Data Collection and Analysis
NOT gold standard

29. Evaluation Results
• Adding semantics graphs enhances overall classification
performance

30. Signals of Radicalisation

31. Graph Patterns

32. Distribution of semantics in Tweets of
pro/anti ISIS users

33. Date, event, location 33
Online
Radicalisation
Is the process by
which individuals are
introduced to ideological
messages and belief
systems that encourage
movement from
mainstream beliefs
toward extreme views,
primarily through the
use of online media
[US Dept. of Justice]

34. content from friend
& followees
Influence of Radicalisations
authored posts
timeline
content from
websites

35. “We cannot allow this
ideology the safe space
it needs to breed – yet
that is precisely what
the internet, and the big
companies that provide
internet-based services
provide”
Theresa May

36. http://trivalent-project.eu/
TRIVALENT – EU project (May 2017-April 2020)
Terrorism Prevention via Radicalisation Counter-narrative
Harith Alani
http://people.kmi.open.ac.uk/harith/
h.alani@open.ac.uk
Twitter: @halani
Miriam FernandezHassan Saif Elizabeth Cano
Work by …