Article2002

Is offender profiling possible? Testing the predicted homology of crime scene actions and background characteristics in a sample of rapists

154 citations0/0 files storedLegal and Criminological Psychology

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Psychopathy, Forensic Psychiatry, Sexual Offending Crime Patterns and Interventions Deception detection and forensic psychology

Abstract

Purpose. Conventional approaches to offender profiling assume a homology of the characteristics of offenders with their crime scene actions: the more similar two offenders are with respect to background characteristics, the higher the resemblance in their crime scene behaviour. This implicit working hypothesis is tested empirically. Methods. The study is based on a sample of 100 British male stranger rapists. These individuals were indexed with respect to the similarity in their crime scene actions as derived from witness statements. They were then compared with respect to their socio‐demographic features and criminal histories as derived from police records. In a correlational analysis, we tested whether increased similarity in one domain (offence behaviour) coincided with higher resemblance in the other domains (socio‐demographic features and previous convictions). Results. There is no positive linear relationship for any of the comparisons, i.e. rapists who offend in a similar fashion are not more similar with respect to age, socio‐demographic features (such as employment situation and ethnicity) or their criminal records. Conclusions. These findings indicate no evidence for the assumption of a homology between crime scene actions and background characteristics for the rapists in the sample. We argue that this result suggests that the homology assumption is too simplistic to provide a basis for offender profiling. Implications for future research include the search for a suitable framework for offender profiling that is grounded in personality psychology. Further, methodological considerations are discussed, such as the potential application of probabilistic scales.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 154 citations exist upstream.

References

1991Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed.)1954Mathematical Thinking in the Social Sciences 1994Intraindividual stability in the organization and patterning of behavior: Incorporating psychological situations into the idiographic analysis of personality.1986Criminal profiling from crime scene analysis 1994Introduction to facet theory: Content design and intrinsic data analysis in behavioral research.1990Criminal personality profiling: An outcome and process study.1995The role of alcohol in sexual aggression

Cited by

2007An empirical test of the assumptions of case linkage and offender profiling with serial commercial robberies.2003Offender profiling and investigative psychology 2005Behavioural linking of stranger rapes 2011A Test of Case Linkage Principles with Solved and Unsolved Serial Rapes 2007Taking Stock of Criminal Profiling 2009Pragmatic solutions to offender profiling and behavioural investigative advice 2008

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.