The pandemic and the forensic linguistics caseworker's wellbeing

Abstract

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, countries have implemented different measures to control the spread of the disease. Policies like lockdowns can negatively impact citizens’ wellbeing (e.g. Rossi et al. 2020), including professionals working with sensitive data and in legal settings (e.g. Barros et al. 2020). For the first time, this article addresses how this general crisis may have affected forensic linguistics caseworkers’ practices and wellbeing. In November 2020, a fixed-response questionnaire was circulated among the forensic linguistics online community. Results show that the most consequential changes in the caseworkers’ professional practices brought about by the pandemic have to do with their working environment and schedule. Following the discussion of the results, some recommendations regarding caseworkers’ self-care are outlined and discussed. Given the constant changes in policies and the evolution of the pandemic, further surveys and a general discussion concerning practitioners’ wellbeing would benefit this professional community.

The Idea of Progress in Forensic Authorship Analysis

“…The other aspect of PAN where change would be useful is in working with forensically relevant problems and data sets. There has to date been no comprehensive survey of practitioners of forensic authorship cases, how analyses are used, and which are submitted in evidence (the closest study to aim at such a survey is perhaps Giménez et al, 2021), and there is a strong need for a welldesigned assessment of end user needs in this area. From such an assessment of current cases, and also a survey of the needs of law enforcement, a better understanding could enable the building of forensically relevant data sets.…”