Biosocial Criminology in the World

Biosocial Criminology

In the world today, many law-abiding citizens bemoan the apparent deterioration of society and the tendency of the youth to succumb to peer pressure, coercion, and other methods of instigation to commit crime. Other critics focus on the parental factor to find not only solutions, but also the causes to explain criminal activity. Further complicating the issue is the differentiation among types of criminal activity and those perpetrating them. While an element of psychopathy is certainly part of the criminal mind, it is important to distinguish activities that relate to predatory crimes from those that are serial in nature. Predatory offending distinguishes itself form serial offending by its connections to seeking out a specific demographic of victim, childhood victimization, and consistent aggression from childhood to adulthood.

Predatory crimes tend to be very focused, and specifically focused on the victimization, concomitantly with overpowering the victim, with the victim being from a specific demographic. . Not all homicides are predatory in nature, for example. However, when a person is murdered for his or her resemblance to a childhood acquaintance of the offender, it is more than likely that the crime is predatory in nature. Indeed, when a serial murderer chooses victims from a certain demographic, it is more than likely that this is related to the offender's past in some way.

Krischer and Sevecke (2008, p. 253) consider various past experiences and how these might affect the current offending pattern. According to the authors, "aggressive or violent" behavior is well correlated with early traumatization in childhood, as well as "adverse family conditions." In other words, an offender's childhood might have resulted in a sense of not being provided with their rightful sources and tools for growing to become effective and productive citizens. The demographic of those who denied the offender these tools, either knowingly or unknowingly, is likely to be the target of future predatory offenses. In other words, predatory offenders tend to operate form a basis of emotional response reactions. Aggression triggered by early childhood injustice begins to emerge in the form of mature, but damaged, response.

DeLisi (2009, p. 260) offers aggression as a specific manifestation of this. The author notes that aggression is linked to temperamental, emotional, and cognitive dimensions. Interestingly, pathological aggression that manifests during childhood and tends to be consistent through the individual's youth and childhood tends to be an indicator of future antisocial behavior. Seigel and Victoroff (2009, p. 210), for example, mention "predatory aggression" as a type of aggression that does not relate to others of its kind, since it focuses on the perception of a "prey object." This in itself proves predatory offending to be far more selective in its choice of not only criminal activity (such as murder and/or rape), but also of the victim demographic.

As for general serial offending, the perpetrator is likely to be generally prone towards psychopathic tendencies. While aggression could be included in this demographic, it is less likely that any psychosocial trait takes precedence over any other. In other words, while predatory offenders are likely to be somewhat ruled by their aggressive tendencies, serial offenders have a more even balance of other psychosocial tendencies as well, including material gain or simply the "high" involved in knowing they are wanted by and running from the police (Salter).