Spiking stories - true or false?
The words reveal a lot
An article by a criminologist on the phenomena of spiking prompted me to share my work which looks at the truthfulness, or otherwise, of the stories told.
I want to preface this look at spiking stories by saying I have no doubt that drink spiking is happening and that needle spiking is happening. I support the view that the way to stop this is for tougher measures to be taken on the perpetrators, rather than potential victims having to make changes.
I’ve been reading the news that spiking incidents around the UK are on the increase this year. I’ve paid particular attention to the stories told by the victims of spiking, both of drink spiking and of spiking by needle.
I started to notice deceptive language being used in some stories I read and decided to take a closer look. While it’s possible that one or two people have concocted or exaggerated stories for their own reasons, how widespread is that?
Deceptive language is a series of indicators that show deception is taking place. You can see many examples in my other articles. The indicators include lack of details or vagueness, qualified statements and attempts to bolster the truth. We’re looking for a straight, clean line to the truth, any deviation from that can be an indicator of deception.
We look for clusters of deceptive language rather than one or two indicators.
It’s important to note that deceptive language use is not an indicator of outright lying. In fact, it’s often underplayed or overplayed truth. Furthermore, deception isn’t always malicious.
Having scanned scores of stories I noticed certain common traits in stories with no clusters of deceptive language present and those that did.
The stories I determined sounded truthful tended to have the following in them:
The stories were told by people from a wide age range
They have an idea of who spiked them and when it happened
The victims articulated very specific symptoms as a result of their spiking.
As soon as the victims realised something serious was happening they extracted themselves from danger and went to a safer place.
They always provide detail on the medical attention they have received and any police intervention.
The stories that contained deceptive language tended to have the following traits:
The age range of these, universally in the ones I studied, came from people in the age range 18 to 21.
The incident has always taken place as part of a big night out rather than a quiet drink, often in the small hours of the morning.
They can’t say when they were spiked and rarely point to a potential perpetrator.
The victims articulate vague symptoms but rarely mention symptoms that could not come from drinking excess alcohol or recreational drugs.
The amount they drink on the night out is always minimised with words like “not that much” or “I didn’t drink enough to be drunk”.
They involve periods of time when they can’t remember what happens (which is at odds with their claim to know how much they had to drink)
They often refer to being aware of the dangers of spiking and the steps they took to minimise their risk.
They often state their intention of telling the story is as a warning.
To be fair to those who appear deceptive, they have often posted their story on social media and the wider media have picked up their words and distributed them further than they were ever meant to go.
Conclusion
Truthful stories are being told.
The traits of the deceptive ones indicate they come from people who aren’t sure if they were spiked or drank too much. Often, they appear to be from people who did drink to excess and would like to tell a better story.