Friction or suspicion? Disfluency, credibility and institutional barriers in fraud prevention from a stammerer's perspective

Spoken interaction plays a central role in everyday social and institutional life. This article examines how interactional disfluency becomes vulnerable to misinterpretation as suspicious or risky within fraud-prevention and identity-verification contexts. While existing literature has examined the medical and psychological impacts of stammering, there is limited criminological insight into how communicative difference is operationalised within fraud-prevention practice.

Using a critical documentary and conceptual analytic approach, this article synthesises literature on stammering, disability, neurodiversity, and social harm to explore how normative assumptions about fluent, rapid, uninterrupted speech are typically embedded within institutional procedures and expectations of credibility. It identifies procedural, structural, social, and linguistic barriers experienced by people who stammer (PWS) that generate communicative friction and expose them to heightened security scrutiny during verification processes. Spoken interaction is frequently operationalised as a behavioural indicator of credibility or risk, creating significant challenges for PWS.

The article argues that communicative fluency operates as a hidden indicator of trust, rendering stammered speech structurally vulnerable to misclassification. Framed criminologically, these harms arise from routine organisational design rather than individual communicative deficit, situating speech-dependent verification as a key site where disability, risk, and legitimacy intersect.