Forensic Psychology For Dummies (65 page)

Arson for profit
is the term given to setting fire to buildings in order to claim the insurance, especially for failing businesses, or unwanted buildings that nobody wants to buy.

Working on violent crimes

Experts make a general distinction between different kinds of violence that’s crucial to the forensic psychologist’s work:

Expressive violence:
The act is an outburst of some emotional feelings.

Instrumental violence:
Violence is being used as means to an end.

People’s relationship to violence can be heavily connected to the culture in which they’re raised. Without doubt, certain subcultures exist in which violence is seen as a dominant means of communication and an expected form of interaction. It may surprise you to know that even in modern developed countries like the UK and US there are subcultures for which violence is a normal aspect of daily life. This is grippingly illustrated in Mikey Walsh’s bestselling autobiography
Gypsy Boy
,
but this is just one of many books that lift the lid on the violent worlds into which some people are born.

I was talking to one young man, as part of preparing his defence for a violent attack and rape that left his victim dead. He grew up in a poor part of Nigeria. He told me that when he was naughty his mother called local soldiers in to beat him up. With such an upbringing, it can’t be a surprise that he exploded into violence when denied what he wanted, although that’s in no way an excuse.

Whether a person grows up surrounded by violence like Walsh, some individuals have especially aggressive personalities, or short fuses. This may be one of the ways of expressing themselves they learned from their family and associates, but it can also be part of their personal narrative in which they feel that they have to defend themselves against any hint of insult by an act of violence. These aggressive people may offer many forms of justification for their violent behaviour (as I explain in Chapter 2).

Helping people to develop other ways of dealing with frustration and anger is challenging, but plenty of ways to try and do so are available (as I describe in Chapter 14).

Rape

The significance of the victim to the offender takes on a different perspective when considering sexual assaults than it does in burglary or arson (crimes I discuss in the earlier section ‘Dealing with property crimes’). As in other types of crime there are many different aspects to rape. Although rapists use their victims to achieve sexual gratification, this isn’t the only or even necessarily the psychologically most significant aspect of rape. Sexual assaults are often coloured with anger and frustration and the desire to control the victim. They may even be mainly an attempt to show where the power lies in a relationship.

Although some individuals get sexually aroused by the control they exert over their victims, and the pain they produce (as I mention in Chapter 2 in my discussion on sadism), that isn’t what usually drives a rapist to be violent to his victim. Some rapists mistakenly believe that the victim will enjoy the violent encounter. They think they’re involved in an acceptable relationship with a woman. In fact, it’s not unknown for potential rapists to run away from a victim who fights and screams, but many victims are so traumatised by the attack that they’re unable to do that.

Many rapists have regular sexual partners and aren’t obviously sexually frustrated, although they’re likely to have been violent to that partner even if the victim doesn’t report it. A few rapists do have a very high sex drive that they have difficulty controlling, but that’s not an explanation for why they rape women.

Forensic psychologists consider three ways in which rapists make use of their victims:

Victim as Object:
When the attacker treats the victim as just an opportunity for his sexual gratification, it matters little to the offender who the victim is or what her reactions are. All he wants to do is to control her enough to be able to carry out the sexual act. This rapist may well have a broad-ranging criminal background, as a thief or involved in other forms of criminality.

Victim as Vehicle:
Here the victim represents some aspect of ‘womenhood’ that the offender wants to control or have power over. Victims may represent women that he feels slighted him in the past or women that he believes are unavailable to him in any other way. Typically, these attackers have little ability to relate to women and may not have a regular sexual partner.

Victim as Person:
These are rapists for whom the victim is a significant person, perhaps their regular sexual partner or someone they’ve been stalking. The rapist may totally misunderstand the nature of his actions, believing the victim wants the sexual act.

Men can be victims of rape too, by other men or even by women. Such victims may be very reluctant to report the crime because of public attitudes. Such men and their male attackers aren’t necessarily homosexual.