Psychology and Law in Europe

When West Meets East

Pär-Anders Granhag, Ray Bull, Alla Shaboltas, Elena Dozortseva, Pär-Anders Granhag, Ray Bull, Alla Shaboltas, Elena Dozortseva

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315317021
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Droit
• Subtopic: Droit pénal

Offering carefully curated articles from the European Association of Psychology and Law (EAPL), this book features chapters from a truly international group of scholars. This text is the first of its kind to offer insights into current developments in psychology and law in Russia. The field of psychology and law has a very long and strong tradition in Russia, but very little is known, as Russian scholars rarely publish their works in English. The volume also contains state-of-the-art chapters on topics at the very core of psychology and law, including offender profiling, lie detection, crime linking, false memories, and witness interviewing.

Features

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• Provides rare insight into Russian history of forensic and criminal psychology

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• Covers core topics in the discipline

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• Offers international scope from a diverse array of contributors

Psychology and Law in Europe: When West Meets East is a text of interest for students of psychology, law, or criminal justice, as well as scholars and practitioners in the field. This text offers a window into global advances in psychology and law.

Crimes: Sex and Money

II

Lay Thinking about ‘Sexual Murderer’ and ‘Victim’ in Groups of Young Russian Men and Women NIKOLAY DVORYANCHIKOV INNA BOVINA OLGA LOGUNOVA ANASTASIYA GUTNICK

4

Contents

4.1 Introduction

4.2 Social Representations Theory

4.3 Sample

4.4 Method

4.5 Results

4.5.1 Sexual Murderer: Content and Structure of Social Representations

4.5.2 Victim: Content and Structure of Social Representations

4.6 Conclusions

Acknowledgement

References

4.1 Introduction

The questions about the offender’s personality, as well as about the reasons of criminal activity are amongst the most interesting ones in legal psychology. The psychological typology of the criminal personality is a method to analyse the criminal behaviour. The typology should be based on the general and stable characteristics of offenders, and these characteristics need to be detectable in the offender’s behaviour. The problem of serial murderers typology and of psychological profiling of them is in the focus of many studies in the fields of legal and psychological knowledge (Godwin, 2001; Logunova, 2014; Logunova, Demidova, & Dvoryanchikov, 2012). The results of these studies have implications for the practice of law enforcement.

The analysis of different typologies conducted by Logunova and colleagues (2012) led the authors to conclude that one of the most promising typology in terms of practical purpose is the one proposed by Sitkovskaya and Konysheva (2002). According to this typology, three types of serial sexual murderers are distinguished: situational offenders, sexual murderers and force users (Sitkovskaya & Konysheva, 2002). This typology is based on motivation of criminal behaviour of offenders. The insufficient social mediation of motives corresponds to the situational offenders. The disturbance of sexual motivation manifested in sadistic domination in sexual relationships is a criterion to distinguish the category of offenders named sexual murderers. In other words, the ways that they use to murder gave them satisfaction of their sexual needs. Finally, the motivation of criminal behaviour of force users becomes apparent by violent ways to satisfy the need for self-affirmation. To put it differently, this category of offenders commits murder in order to accomplish control and power. In the recent study conducted by Logunova (2014), this typology of sexual murderers got additional empirical support.

Another interesting line of research on sexual murderers concerns their personality and gender identity. The analysis proposed by Dvoryanchikov, Nosov and Salamova (2011) found an interesting description done by Brittain in his seminal paper ‘The Sadistic Murderer’ in 1970. The portrait of the serial sexual murderer contained the following characteristics: reserved, timid and anxiety-ridden, he feels inferior in his everyday relations with others and as result, he prefers to dominate and to humiliate women because they are not accessible for him in real life. These results were obtained in other studies as well (Dvoryanchikov et al., 2011). This person is sexually restrained and inexperienced, has sexual deviations (such as fetishism and transvestism) and has rich sadistic fantasies, its implementation is motivated by low self-esteem. The accuracy of this description was confirmed repeatedly in other studies (Dvoryanchikov et al., 2011). Langevin and colleagues (1985) demonstrated that the majority of sadistic offenders had disturbances of gender identity; it is manifested, at least, by gender indifference and femininity. From our point of view it could be very interesting to reveal how laypersons explain the sexual murderer’s personality.

The analysis of the serial murderers attracts attention not only of the scientific community, but also attention of lay people who try to analyse the offender personality and behaviour by their proper methods. The mass media and cinema play the crucial role in supplying lay people with the images of offenders, as well as the ideas about their motivation and models of crime.

According to Godwin (2001) the serial murderers got the attention of the world of entertainment after the publication of profiling principles by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). From this point of view this topic became quite popular because of films like Silence of the Lambs, Seven, Copycat and The X-Files. This line of films is growing every year.

At the same time, the problem of serial murders became an important theme of public discussion as well. Being exposed to the different kinds of information circulating in the mass media, in cinema and in the popular literature lay people worked out their proper explanations to this kind of crimes, they built up their own classifications of aggressors and of victims, and they attributed particular characteristics to each of them. The purpose of this ‘naïve scientific activity’ is to understand the world and to make it controllable. Lay people also use different kinds of knowledge coming from scientific ideas and real live stories shared with friends and acquaintances and heard from strangers. As a result, people reduce the scare related to the murder itself and overcome the danger of the murderer.

The particularity of this topic is defined by the fact that in the discussion about the sexual murderer and victim, the gender identity of the interlocutors becomes salient. Men and women need to work out different strategies to overcome this danger. Our main objective in this reported study was to reveal and to compare lay thinking about sexual murderer and victim in groups of young Russian men and women. The productive theoretical framework to reach our objective was the social representations theory proposed by Moscovici (2000).

4.2 Social Representations Theory

According to one amongst many definitions, social representation is ‘a form of knowledge, socially elaborated and shared, having a practical aim, and concurring to the construction of a common reality to a social whole’ (Jodelet, 1989, p. 36). As Moscovici underlines it: ‘the purpose of all representations is to make something unfamiliar, or unfamiliarity itself, familiar. What I mean is that consensual universes are places where everybody wants to feel at home, secure from any risk’ (2000, p. 37).

The creation of the social representations helps people to adapt the strangeness related to objects, phenomena, events, other people and so on by putting it into the existing frame of references. This transformation definitely has a defensive function. The other functions of social representations are the following: the function of communication facilitation, the function of regulation of social behaviour and practice, the function of social identity construction and support and the function of justification of social relations (Abric, 2001; Breakwell, 2001; Doise, 1986).

Amongst several methodological approaches towards the social representations analysis, we prefer the structural approach proposed and developed by Abric and his followers (Abric, 2001, 2003). This approach gives an opportunity to compare the social representations of the same object worked out in different groups by revealing their structure as well as to analyse the relations between social representations of different objects elaborated by the same group by revealing the structure of the social representation. This structure is consisted of the central system (or central core) and the peripheral system. The central core, as Abric said, consists of ‘one or several elements that give the representation its meaning’ (2001, p. 43). The central system gives meaning to the whole representation, it maintains stability of the representation and it plays the main role in the organisation of the representation; the peripheral system plays a crucial role in the protection of the central system stability (and, therefore, in the protection of the representation itself against any transformations) and plays an important role in a concretisation and adaptation of the central system elements (Abric, 2001). The central system is ‘linked to collective memory and to the history of the group’ (Abric, 1993, p. 76) that shares the representations; whereas, the peripheral system is linked to individual memory and experience. The central system is consensual and it provides the homogeneity of the group. The peripheral system plays the main role in the adaptation of the central system to the changing context; this part of the representation is not consensual, it provides the heterogeneity of the group (Abric, 1993). As one can see there is a hierarchy in the structure of the social representation: the central system is formed by the main elements, and the peripheral systems are organised around the less important elements.

This theory can contribute to the domain of lay thinking about crime and offenders and this knowledge seems to have practical implications for the preventive programs. However, research in this field is very scarce. The analysis of the literature reveals that there are only few studies concerning the social representations of crimes and offenders. For example, in one study conducted in Switzerland (Hammer, Widmer, & Robert, 2009)the social representations of crime reasons and attitudes towards the punishment were analysed and it was revealed that there was a relation between the subjective proximity to crime and the attitudes towards punishment.

Goulevitch (2000) investigated the content of social representations of crime, offenders, victims and specialists of legal system; she found out that the social representations about crimes were not simply a list of crimes; people create their own understanding of hierarchy of crimes.

In a recent study concerning with the social representations of crime, offender and victim realised in structural approach to social representations (Bovina & Bovin, 2013), it was found that the representation of offender was crystallised around three main elements: murderer, thief and bad person. An offender is guilty of the crimes. The representation of victim was structured around two elements: innocent and complainant.

Taking into consideration these results as well as the key ideas of the social representations theory, we put forward several propositions. (1) The social representations of the sexual murderer and victim would be different in groups of young men and women as a result of different strategy defensive functions of the social representations. Namely, in groups of young men the central system of the social representations of sexual murderer and victim would consist of more elements than the central system of the social representations of sexual murderer and victim in groups of young women. (2) The elements of the central system of the social representations of sexual murderer and of victim would be more shared and concrete in groups of young women in comparison with the ones in groups of young men.

4.3 Sample

A total of 224 Russian students (117 females and 107 males) aged from 17 to 31 years (M_age = 19.70; SD = 2.07) participated in the study. The study was totally anonymous, subjects participated voluntarily and they were recruited at several universities of Moscow. The sample was composed by students on social sciences.

4.4 Method

The questionnaire consisted of several parts. In the first part the free associations task was used in order to reveal the social representations, the stimuli were ‘sexual murderer’ and ‘victim’. The subjects were asked to write at least five words of expressions which immediately come into their minds. The free association technique is usually used in the analysis of social representations, because it reveals the latent dimensions of the semantic universe of the studied object (Abric, 2003). In the numerous studies where the free association technique was implemented, the subjects were presented with a key word (or key words) and they were asked to give from three to five words that come to their minds immediately (for example, Bonnec, 2002; Dany, Urdapilleta, & Lo Monaco, 2014; Flament & Rouquette, 2003). From these data the structure of the social representations in groups of males and females was revealed.

In the second part of the questionnaire, the socio-demographic questions (about age and gender) were asked.

The overall structure of the social representations of sexual murderer and victim was revealed by applying the prototypical analysis proposed by Vergès (1992), the so-called rank-frequency method (Dany et ...