Major historical shifts in the field of fertility, childbirth, and parenting have implications for feminist psychologists working on these topics. These shifts include approaches to sexuality and reproduction: a population control emphasis in the late 1940s, a reproductive rights paradigm in the 1990s, and progression from reproductive rights to reproductive justice. Feminist psychologists have to traverse the political landscape created by these broad approaches. In this chapter, we suggest ways in which such engagement may be facilitated through examination of mainstream assumptions and outcomes and the use of nuanced feminist research. Drawing from transnational feminisms, the principles of reproductive justice, and examples of research and interventions in reproductive decision-making, abortion, obstetric violence, "deviant" (m)others, early reproduction, and contraception, we argue that feminist psychology should attend to both global and cross-cutting power relations concerning fertility and reproduction, as well as localized dynamics.

Chapter 1 provides a general introduction to the book, outlining the need for police investigators to engage in online identity assumption and justifying a linguistic contribution that can be made in terms of the variety of ways in which linguists and forensic linguists have approached questions of language and identity. We set out the context of online sexual abuse, in particular the abuse of children.

Chapter 3 expands on the experimental phase of the project, providing an account of its design and a thorough discussion of the results and their implications. The chapter explores the level of accuracy with which participants in IM are able to detect the substitution of one interlocutor with another, and the levels of confidence with which such decisions are made. It also addresses the effects of impersonator preparation on these scores. Finally, the linguistic criteria that people report having relied upon in making these assessments are scrutinised, and we are thus able to formulate opinions about which features are the most salient for the construction of one’s linguistic identity.

Chapter 2 outlines the various sources of our data, which include logs of instant messaging conversations collected from genuine resolved cases of child sexual grooming, from a range of Dark Web fora dedicated to the topic of child sexual abuse, from undercover operations targeting the producers and disseminators of indecent images and videos of children, from role -playing exercises that take place within the Pilgrim Course for online investigators, and from a series of experiments we designed in order to systematically investigate key questions around language and identity performance. The chapter continues by describing our methodological approach to these data, starting with the micro-analysis at the structural level of language, including of vocabulary and orthographic features as we first began setting out in MacLeod and Grant (2012). We then move through our modifications of Searle’s (1969) Speech Act Theory and Gumperz’s (1982) approach to topic management inasmuch as they relate to instant messaging and the operational context, before finally setting out our theory about how these stratified levels of language interface in the performance of identities. Finally, the chapter concludes with a discussion of ethics, both the research ethics of engaging with this area of criminal activity and the operational ethics of assisting the police in these contexts.

Finally, Chapter 7 discusses the implications of our work for the operational task of identity assumption, and for the more theoretical concerns around the linguistic individual and language and identity more generally. We conclude the chapter with our thoughts for the directions similar research might take in the future.

The linguistic identity assumption training we currently provide to undercover officers is the subject of Chapter 4. Here we focus in particular on how our component of the Pilgrim training has been influenced by our own theories of identity performance as supported by our analyses. We outline the input we provide to trainees at the levels of linguistic structure, meaning and interaction, and describe the pro forma we provide for the analysis of online linguistic personae. We also report here on the findings of a small-scale experiment comparing trainees’ competence at linguistic identity assumption before our training versus afterwards.

The theoretical underpinning to the concept of identity is the central topic of Chapter 5, where we examine particular facets of identity such as the performance of age, relationships and communities of practice. Keeping in mind our view of identity as being continuously negotiated through discursive practices, we focus here particularly on how age is treated as a relevant identity category by participants, and how relationships between adult offenders and child victims are performed. We probe the question of how these performances are situated in the wider social context, and in relation to other, more recognisable types of relationship that might be relied upon as resources.

Drawing together all the previous chapters, Chapter 6 explicates the ways in which forensic linguistics can continue to provide support to the work of undercover online officers. Breaking down traditional constraints that have seen the work of the forensic linguist in this area limited to authorship analysis tasks, we sustain the argument here that we can usefully contribute to the strategy of authorship synthesis. While there is enormous potential for linguistic contributions to these policing tasks of identity assumption and infiltration, there are, of course, limitations. Both are discussed in detail in this chapter.