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This essay aims to provide an answer to whether or not criminologists can provide an adequate explanation for serial killing. Academic experts and police believe that serial killing is the rarest form of homicide, however a serial killer is categorised as an individual who has killed three or more people, who were previously unknown to the killer, with a ‘cooling-off’ period between killings. Psychological explanations of crime provide a unique way of looking at criminals. They are more focused on the individual itself, rather than its surroundings and thus have huge input into trying to explain and categorise serial killing. However, this is not dismissing the relevance of other theoretical approaches to crime such as sociological explanations.
“In Merton’s view, A... ... middle of paper ... ...es. Works Cited Paternoster, Raymond and Ronet Bachman. 2001. “Introduction to Anomie/Strain Theories of Crime” in Paternoster and Bachman (Eds.) Explaining Criminals and Crime.
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Serial killers tend to have curiosity in police-related a... ... middle of paper ... ...er (Godwin and Canter 27). (Encounter and Death: The spatial behavior of US serial killers) Works Cited Dietz, Park E. "Mass, serial and sensational homicides." Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 62.5 (1986): 477. Godwin, Maurice, and David Canter. "Encounter and death: The spatial behavior of US serial killers."
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It is the goal of this work to provide the reader with a basic understanding of the function and application of forensic psychology, as well as an explication of some of its strengths and weaknesses. Profiling itself has been in use since Jack the Ripper in London during the 1880s. George Phillips and Thomas Bond made predictions about the murderer’s personality based on the information at the crime scene (Winerman, 2004). The FBI now runs the Behavioral Science Unit (BSU) and the Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) made popular by the television show Criminal Minds. Forensic profilers interact with a large variety of crime, but the focus of this paper will lie on the interaction of profiling and serial killers.
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