Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling最新文献

The purpose of this study is to explore cases of missing persons suspected of being criminal. Specifically, this research aims to empirically describe the circumstances surrounding criminal disappearances and examine whether there are different subcategories within these cases using a victimological framework. The data used in this study come from an operational police database. The sample includes 155 unsolved missing person cases whose thorough investigation by the police concluded that a criminal motive remained the most likely hypothesis. These cases occurred on the entire territory of metropolitan France and overseas. Multidimensional scale analysis was used to explore the context of disappearance according to missing person characteristics, lifestyle, everyday activities, and situational exposure at the time of the disappearance. Results show that the distribution of variables in a two-dimensional space reveals four distinct different categories related to lifestyle and situational exposure: riskier lifestyle, riskier situation, safer situation, and safer lifestyle. This study is the first to empirically explore unsolved missing person cases suspected of a criminal outcome. Moreover, the framework used in this study demonstrates the importance of victimology in an investigative context.

Factors such as cultural norms and stereotypes influence how child sexual abuse (CSA) is perceived in relation to gender of the offender and perceptions of responsibility and harm in Puerto Rico. Finkelhor and Browne's traumagenic dynamics model served as the theoretical framework for the investigation because it addresses four key factors related to the experience of CSA victims. A total of 525 people living in Puerto Rico participated in the study. They were asked to read a hypothetical case of CSA by a teacher with a minor student and answer related questions. Point-biserial correlational analyses were used to assess the influence of gender of the offender on perceptions of CSA. Results of the study indicated the male offender was attributed more responsibility and harm for the offence. Both male and female minor victims were identified by participants as partly responsible for the offence. Male and female offenders were identified as victims. Findings of this study could help to improve understanding of cultural differences in perceptions of CSA cases and its consequences.

The need for remote psychological assessment came to the fore during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown. This paper examines the qualitative experiences of psychologists and patients using remote video interfaces for psychological assessment during that period. The aim was to gain qualitative data on the personal experiences of both parties and explore whether remote assessment via video interface is a satisfactory method for psychological evaluations. Patients were seen for psychological assessments by consultant Clinical and Counselling Psychologists via through videoconference. Consultants and patients were asked about their experience of the video assessment and the consultant recorded their responses. Content Analysis was used to analyse the responses. The remote mode of assessment was found to be satisfactory to both patient and psychologist, although technical issues were highlighted to be the most disruptive to assessments. Consultants reported a certain level of fatigue, particularly after evaluations, and some of them commented that they had to try harder than in a face-to-face evaluation. Distraction in the patient environment was considered detrimental. The small sample size which requires further replication studies. Overall, the use of videoconference was found to be a satisfactory method for psychological assessment with some areas for improvement, such as technical difficulties and fatigue.

The current study aimed at testing the impact of the cognitive interview for suspects (CIS) used by trained custom officers on the quantity of gathered details, compared to a control standard interview (SI) used by untrained officers. Forty-five mock-suspects were required to perform a series of actions and each was interviewed by a pair of customs officers. Participants had to give statements containing truthful parts and deceptive parts. The CIS elicited significantly more details than the SI. Truthful parts of the statements contained more details than deceptive parts. An interaction effect revealed that the CIS elicited a higher number of action details in truthful parts. It is worthwhile for professionals in the field to adopt the CIS, which provides valuable benefits for information gathering. Moreover, the increase in action details raise the question of considering it as a possible lie detection tool.

This study developed and tested a new geographic profiling method for automating suspect prioritisation in crime investigations. The Geographic Profiling Suspect Mapping And Ranking Technique (GP-SMART) maps suspects' activity locations available in police records—such as home addresses, family members' home addresses, prior offence locations, locations of non-crime incidents, and other contacts with police—and ranks suspects based on both the proximity and nature of these locations, relative to an input crime. In accuracy tests using solved burglary, robbery and extra-familial sex offence cases in New Zealand (n = 4511), GP-SMART ranked the offender at or near the top of the suspect list at rates greatly exceeding chance. Highlighting the benefit of its novel inclusion and differentiation of many different types of activity location, GP-SMART also outperformed baseline methods—approximating existing algorithms—that ranked suspects using only the proximity of their activity locations, or home addresses, to the input crime.