Serious violent offenders : Are they unique in the offendingbehavioural profile?

Sammanfattning: Introduction. Serious violent offenders and their offending behaviour stood in focus of thisstudy. Scientific literature tends to classify offenders into non-violent or violent; however,it is known that within the area of violent crime, dimensions of offending behaviour such asgoal-directedness, provocation and planning can be expressed differently. The present studyuses these dimensions to evaluate the construct of serious violent offending by analysingdifferent cases, comparing their offending behavioural profiles and evaluating at what levelthese profiles are consistent with the common psychopathic offending behaviour.Methods. Verdicts and Preliminary investigation protocols of nine Swedish offenderslabelled as seriously violent were used to gather the information from scene investigations,autopsy reports and offender/victim interrogations in order to describe the crime history andcrime dynamics of the cases which served as a basis for assessing different dimensions,using the values from a violent incident coding sheet.Results. Cases of serious violent offending displayed heterogeneity rather thanhomogeneity in the offending behaviour. Homicide offenders demonstrated a mixed patternof behaviour compared to sex offenders who showed a more homogeneous profile withtypically goal-directed, unprovoked and impulsive behaviour, also being more consistentwith the offending behaviour commonly displayed by psychopathic offenders.Conclusion. Based on the dimensions analysed, a universal serious violent offendingbehavioural profile does not seem to exist. More criminological research with a largernumber of subjects is required, however, findings from this study make it arguable tosuggest that sex offenders might benefit from treatment focusing on improving their selfcontrolcompared to homicide offenders where aspects of emotional regulation seem to beof even greater importance.