Forensic linguistic evidence of psychological abuse and discursive manipulation in cyberstalking cases

Abstract This article investigates how psychological abuse is discursively enacted through subtle forms of coercion and control in Italian cyberstalking cases. Based on a corpus of 447 messages sent by male perpetrators to female victims across three Italian cases, the study explores how language is mobilized to assert dominance and control. Drawing on Speech Act Theory ( Austin [1962] 2018 ; Searle [1969] 1975 ) and Pence and Paymar’s (1993) “Power and Control Wheel” the analysis combines linguistic and psychological coding to trace communicative patterns ranging from affective appeals to veiled threats and surveillance. The findings show that digital coercion is sustained through recurring verbal strategies that present domination as affection, normalizing psychological abuse as care. By combining forensic linguistics and psychology, the study advances discourse-analytic research on online gender-based violence and proposes a framework for identifying linguistic indicators of coercive control.