Goodwill Alasdair M, Alison Laurence J
Centre for Forensic and Family Psychology, School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, UK.
Behav Sci Law. 2007;25(6):823-40. doi: 10.1002/bsl.778.
Debate continues with regard to the possibility of inferring an offender's characteristic features from crime scene details (the process of so-called "offender profiling"). We argue that psychology generally has benefited from appreciating context in predicting behavior. In the same way, profiling would benefit from an appreciation of context in predicting characteristics. This "reverse" process is contingent on various "if...then" relationships. As one example, this paper demonstrates how profiling offender age from victim age is contingent on (i) the level of planning and (ii) the level of aggression displayed during the offense. Eighty-five stranger rape case records formed the data set. Moderated regression analysis revealed that victim age is a significant predictor of offender age only in cases where the offender has (i) shown evidence of planning the attack and/or (ii) acts in a gratuitously aggressive manner. The theoretical bases for these findings may lie in the extent to which offenders disparately plan and target victims and how extreme aggressiveness in stranger rapes may relate to a near-peer proxy for an offender's anger. The implications of the results for the processes and methods involved in offender profiling suggest that certain crime scene factors can have differential moderating effects on predictive outcomes.
关于能否从犯罪现场细节推断出罪犯的特征（即所谓的“罪犯侧写”过程），争论仍在继续。我们认为，心理学总体上受益于在预测行为时考虑情境。同样，侧写在预测特征时也会受益于对情境的理解。这种“反向”过程取决于各种“如果……那么……”的关系。例如，本文展示了根据受害者年龄推断罪犯年龄如何取决于（i）犯罪的计划程度和（ii）犯罪过程中表现出的攻击程度。八十五起陌生人强奸案记录构成了数据集。调节回归分析表明，只有在罪犯（i）有攻击计划的证据和/或（ii）行为无端具有攻击性的情况下，受害者年龄才是罪犯年龄的重要预测指标。这些发现的理论基础可能在于罪犯在策划和选择受害者时的差异程度，以及陌生人强奸案中的极端攻击性可能与罪犯愤怒的近似同龄人替代对象之间的关系。研究结果对罪犯侧写所涉及的过程和方法的启示表明，某些犯罪现场因素可能对预测结果产生不同的调节作用。
