Predicting the Criminal Record of Spanish Stranger Rapists from Their Crime Scene Behaviours

ABSTRACT

Despite the development of Offending Profiling models for Stranger Rapists in UK contexts, there has been little focus on the extent to which these models cross validate for other countries. Drawing upon offender profiling, cross-cultural and sex offending literature, 233 cases of sexual assault committed by stranger offenders (one offender, one victim) were analyzed to produce a Spanish Stranger Rapist model. Chi-square associations are considered between the characteristics of offenders and their crime scene behaviors. Significant associations were then entered into a binary logistic regression to explore which crime scene behaviors can be used to predict offenders’ prior convictions. The findings suggest a number of differences between UK and Spanish Stranger Rapists. Spanish Police Profilers could develop misleading profiles if reliant on UK-centric models. In the present study, we found that offenders’ diminished volitional and intellectual capacities predicts offenders’ psychiatric history, values stolen predicts offenders’ prior convictions for theft and non-sexual violence, and a surprise approach predicts a serial sexual offender. Further work is needed to confirm the validity and reliability of this Spanish model with a new larger sample of cases and to establish its usefulness for Spanish police investigations. The same methodology could be applied to other crime types, including Spanish homicide and sexual homicide.

KEYWORDS:

• Police investigation
• sexual assault
• stranger offenders
• offender profiling
• Spain

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.