Forensic Psychology For Dummies (64 page)
Read Forensic Psychology For Dummies Online
Authors: David Canter
Tying weapons to offenders
One of my students did a remarkable study of criminal weapon use in her native Brazil, where criminals use a wide variety of weapons. She went into prisons and asked 120 offenders what weapons they used and why. She found that the weapons were chosen for their symbolic significance for the offenders and related to their personality and consequently the types of crimes they committed.
The very aggressive offenders whose crimes were an expression of emotional feelings, such as those with the tragic or heroic personal narratives (that I describe in the earlier section ‘Hearing the stories people tell themselves: Criminal narratives’), and who had dominating and extrovert personalities, were more likely to use knives and weapons that involved direct contact with the victims. They used these weapons to commit rape and murder. Those who used firearms, which kept them at a distance from their victims, were more likely to be involved in acquisitive crimes for which their weapons were just to control their victims rather than hurt them.
Burglary
A huge psychological difference exists between a burglar who takes precautions to avoid contact with the occupant of a building and one who doesn’t mind or even relishes such confrontation. In general, the former is most common. The majority of burglars go to a lot of trouble: they watch a house to make sure that everyone has left and knock on the door first to make sure no one answers. If someone does, they just ask for a fictitious person and apologise and leave, saying they have the wrong address.
Some burglars who avoid confrontation are nonetheless interested in the occupants of the building. They rummage through drawers without taking anything and may even destroy property unnecessarily just to insult the occupants. The courts take account of this, treating it as a more serious form of burglary than just stealing a handbag left by an open window.
The professional burglar may avoid domestic buildings entirely and focus on the opportunities provided by commercial premises. One young offender that I spoke to made clear that although his aim was to obtain goods of value to sell on, he really saw the crime as an adventure in which he was challenging the police. The owners of the warehouses he burgled were of no significance to him. What mattered to him was whether he could get away before the police caught him (he didn’t and they did!).
Arson
The key to understanding arson is the nature of the target that’s set on fire. Broadly, four sorts of targets exist and each carries different implications for the inferences that a forensic psychologist makes:
Domestic buildings in which people may be present.
The people are likely to be the target and the arsonist is acting out a narrative of a heroic mission to wrong some hurt he suffered.
These places have symbolic significance for the arsonist and may often be related to some mental disturbance he experienced.
The term
pyromania
is sometimes used to describe someone who gets pleasure from watching buildings on fire and so carries out a series of arson attacks. He may get excitement from the arrival of the fire-fighters and the whole dramatic event. Some experts even think that sexual arousal may be involved in this excitement.
Here, arson is a strategy of the criminal who sees himself as a professional getting rid of the forensic evidence.
A fire in which the arsonist gets hurt or even killed may well be a painful form of (attempted) suicide, most likely carried out by someone known to be mentally ill.