The Assessment of Anonymous Threatening Communications

Perhaps now more than any time in history, anonymous threatening communications (ATCs) are easily delivered, highly disruptive, and frequently used by offenders who seek to frighten, harass, and intimidate their victims. The ability to quickly and defensibly triage and evaluate ATCs has become a necessary skill for threat assessment professionals who serve on corporate security, education, or community-based teams. In this chapter, the authors (both former members of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit) provide a step-by-step operational guide for the analysis of ATCs. The methods and strategies shared by the authors can be easily adopted and used by threat assessors to confidently address this growing challenge.

Tackling offensive behaviour in Scottish football: A how (not) to guide to developing criminal justice policy?

Since 2011, the issue of ‘sectarianism’ has dominated the Scottish political agenda as well as media and public discourse. The most high-profile aspect of the Scottish Government’s response to the problem was undoubtedly the Offensive Behaviour at Football (Scotland) Act 2012. This article is based on analysis of official documentation, speeches and media coverage relating to sectarianism and the Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications Act since 2011. By tracing the Act’s journey from its introduction to its repeal in 2018, it challenges notions of a policymaking process built on consensus. It also casts doubt upon the Scottish Government’s claims of a socially progressive approach to criminal justice, as the behaviours of working-class youth around football have been increasingly problematised, criminalised and regulated. I argue that the Act highlights the need for an ongoing critique of the direction of criminal justice in Scotland and demonstrates the consequences of knee-jerk responses to complex social problems, which has relevance beyond the Scottish context.

Illicit Genres: The Case of Threatening Communications

This study takes a novel approach to the study of threatening communications by arguing that they can be characterized as a genre – a genre that generally carries strong connotations of intimidation, fear, aggression, power, and coercion. We combine the theoretical framework of Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) with results from theoretical and empirical analyses of threats to arrive at a more comprehensive perspective of threats. Since threats do not form part of any regular curriculum of genres, we designed a survey to test how recognizable they are. While scholars on threats describe threatening communications as remarkably varied in form and contextual features, the majority of our respondents categorized test items as threats without prompts of any kind, indicating that threats are a recognizable genre. We propose that threatening communications belong to a wider category of illicit genres: i.e. genres that generally disrupt and upset society and commonly affect their targets negatively. The uptakes of illicit genres are very different from those of other genres, as the users of the genres often actively avoid naming them, making uptake communities significant shapers of illicit genres. The present study contributes to research on threatening communications, since genre theory sheds light on important situational factors affecting the interpretation of a text as a threat – this is a particularly contentious question when it comes to threats that are indirectly phrased. The study also contributes to genre theory by pointing to new territory for genre scholars to examine, namely illicit genres. Studies of illicit genres also have wider, societal benefits as they shed light on different kinds of problematic rhetorical behavior that are generally considered destructive or even dangerous.

In the wake of hate: A mixed-method analysis of anonymous threatening communications sent during the 2016 US presidential election

On January 20, 2017, Republican candidate Donald J. Trump was sworn in as the 45th President of the United States. The run-up to this inauguration was marked by unusually hostile political rhetoric. For many, this linguistic divisiveness was fodder for the post-election surge in physical and verbal aggression. Using a mixed-method approach that combines actuarial and speech act assessment, this study examines 30 Anonymous Threatening Communications sent during the US presidential election for the presence and prevalence of (para)linguistic features associated with verbal and physical threat. The article argues for more forensic linguistic research into mainstream producers and consumers of hate-filled political rhetoric.

The stance of stalking: a corpus-based analysis of grammatical markers of stance in threatening communications

Threats made by stalkers have tremendous negative effects on the more than one million victims who receive them every year – from experiencing ‘psychological terrorism’ to undergoing physical harm ( Burgess and Marchetti, 2009 ). However, stalking, a criminal offence within the law, is ill-defined and difficult to prosecute, since the victim of stalking must demonstrate the stalker's intent to intimidate or cause ‘substantial emotional distress’ ( Black et al., 1990 : 717). Linguistically, such indicators of emotion and intent are manifested by markers of ‘stance’, a speaker/writer's culturally organised feelings, judgments or assessments about a recipient or proposition ( Biber et al., 1999 ). Through a corpus analysis of 397 authentic threats, I examine variation in the manifestation and function of overt grammatical markers of stance (adverbials, modals, and that- and to-complement clauses) between threats to stalk, harass and defame. Specifically, certainty verbs + that-complement clause constructions and prediction modals occurred at a significantly higher rate (p<0.001) in stalking threats – those in which the victims reported feeling intense fear or distress. In addition, strong co-occurrence patterns were found between these stance markers and pronouns. And, when using a qualitative social constructionist approach to examine distinctions in stance meaning and reveal underlying functional patterns, ( Precht, 2003 : 255), three distinctive functional patterns were revealed with the trigrams ‘I will be’, ‘I will have’ and ‘you know that’, wherein the stalking threatener is in complete volitional control of his or her own actions, demonstrates possession over the victim or an object related to the threat, and accuses the victim of a behaviour thought to be wrong, respectively. Therefore, while it has been demonstrated that there is not a one-to-one correspondence between linguistic markers and threateners' actions ( Gales, 2010 ; and Lord et al., 2008 ), through a closer examination of overt grammatical markers of stance – in combination with social psychology theories connecting speaker role, power and fear (e.g., Burgess and Marchetti, 2009 ) – linguists can help hone an understanding of stance in stalking threats and potentially contribute to the demonstration of a victim's claim of feeling fear.

An ‘Anti-Sectarian’ Act? Examining the Importance of National Identity to the ‘Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications (Scotland) Act’

The 2010-11 football season in Scotland was affected by many incidents of violence and threatening behaviour. Fans of the two Glasgow clubs, Celtic and Rangers, were involved in the majority of these incidents. Players and officials of Celtic were targeted by Loyalist terrorists and sent bullets through the post. The Scottish government felt that many of the incidents were motivated by religious, ethnic, and national hatred, and introduced an Act of Parliament in order to tackle the problems that had arisen. The ‘Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications (Scotland) Act’ came into law on 1 March 2012, representing a governmental judgement that Scottish football is negatively affected by inter-communal tension. The Act criminalises violent incidents and threatening behaviour related to the expression of religious hatred towards football fans, players, and officials. It also explicitly targets expressions of hatred on ethnic and national grounds. This is significant because in the contemporary era, much of what is termed ‘sectarianism’ in Scotland is directly related to national identity, particularly British and Irish identities. The modern iconography of Celtic and Rangers has comparatively little to do with religion, and relates to differing visions of Scotland, the United Kingdom, and the island of Ireland. Incidents that are termed ‘sectarian’ are often best examined through the prism of nationalism, for in contemporary Scotland it is national identity that is most significant to those who perpetrate the actions that the Act seeks to tackle.