Psychology Essay- Criminology

Psychology Essay- Criminology

Describe what is meant by ‘bottom up’ and ‘top down’ when applied to offender profiling’.

Offender profiling is a set of techniques used to try and identify perpetrators of a serious crime. Offender profiling will tend to use the expertise of a professional psychologist, although profilers come from different types of backgrounds because there is no specific training for the job. The profiler will draw on his knowledge of personality theory to attribute personality traits to the offender. The profiler will consider many elements when carrying out a profile, such as the crime scene, the offence, the sex of the victim and offender, body deposition site and the interaction style. These are just a few of the issues the profiler will consider. There are many different definitions of offender profiling today; according to Turco (1993) offender profiling is ‘the preparation of a biological sketch, gathered from information taken at a crime scene...