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Jason Frowley PhD's avatar

Thank you for your thoughtful comments! I’m planning a newsletter on the state of the game in offenders profiling. I hope it will be out in a month or so. Stay tuned!

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Jason Frowley PhD's avatar

No apology necessary, Karl! It’s good to chat about these topics. Apologies for my late reply, by the way. I was away for a few days and just came back.

Is the ‘Sexual Homicide’ book you mention the one by Burgess & Ressler (I think they were the authors)? That’s the FBI’s first attempt at classifying serial killers. It introduced the works to the distinction between ‘organised’ and ‘disorganised’ killers. That one is still around, but the most recent meta-analysis I’ve found in the litter actually indicates that various papers over the last decade or so have changed and added to the typology endlessly. It’s a developing field and who can tell what’s going to come along next?

Depending on how you classify serial killers, then, there are digests if deciding whether they are sexually-motivated. In fact, some writers have claimed that all serial killers are ultimately sexually motivated. Others think power or a sense of mission is more important in explaining some categories of serial killer. It’s all change and it’s be a brave psychologist who made a prediction about what the next classification is going to be.

Anyway, when they say profiles were ‘helpful’ it’s not necessarily the case that they have any scientific definition of the term in mind. In fact, early work in serial killers was notoriously unscientific in nature. It’s perfectly possible they just meant a police off over hit in touch and said, ‘Thanks, that was helpful’. For sure, the FBI has been quite invested in making offender profiling appear impressive. You never read a book by an FBI profiler in which they tell you modestly about all their failures. That’s a problem in itself of course and tends to add yet another layer of uncertainty…

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