On Developing a Pragmatic Framework to Analyse Computer‑Mediated Communications for Evidence of Encouraged Suicide

Abstract

This research takes a tripartite approach to addressing the ambiguity of encouraged suicide (ES) legislation in the UK and offers a means of identifying whether an offence has taken place. In Stage 1, I seek to provide clearer legal definitions for the acts relevant to ES as a communications offence; these are assistance, coercion, encouragement, persuasion and promotion. I argue that the current definitions of these criteria are ambiguous, facilitating a high degree of subjectivity in prosecuting and sentencing an alleged ES offence. In Stage 2, using one-to-one messaging data, I test two analytical frameworks for their suitability in identifying ES acts. The first of these is appraisal theory, which I conclude is not specific enough to account for the nuances of the different criteria in ES legislation. The second is a novel framework incorporating the pragmatics-based definitions of the ES criteria in Stage 1, which considers them illocutionary acts through the lens of speech act theory. This new tool (the Illocutionary Acts framework) is designed and reliability tested to be suitable for theoretical courtroom application owing to the possibility of future ES cases involving forensic linguists to provide an opinion on whether an offence has been committed based on language evidence. Stage 3 then applies the Illocutionary Acts framework in an exploratory analysis of a pro-suicide forum to suggest whether the language of this data would fall under the criteria of an ES offence in the UK. The findings of this research suggest that there are distinctions and degrees of severity between the ES speech acts in relation to culpability. Further, the Illocutionary Acts framework returns satisfactory inter-rater reliability scores for identifying occurrences of the ES speech acts in both the one-to-one and forum data. Analysis of the pro-suicide forum represents a new overview of this online landscape and offers a comparison with one-to-one ES.