Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4. The concept of expertise applied to the criminal context assumes that offenders are driven by the abilities to both maximize the payoffs and minimize the risks associated with the crime-commission. This study tested the articulation between these two types of decisions taken by stranger rapists to successfully commit their crime.
Specifically, this study aims to identify whether offenders whose modus operandi is indicative of criminal expertise are more likely to use forensic awareness strategies. Multivariate analyses conducted on 1, cases showed that stranger rapists who adopted behaviors indicative of expertise were more likely to use forensic awareness strategies to decrease the risk of police detection.
Mixed associations were found between the number of forensic awareness strategies and their nature i. Implications for research and practice are discussed. Keywords: criminal expertise, sexual crime, rational choice theory, modus operandi, forensic awareness strategies, stranger rape. Hirschi challenged the idea that offending requires sophistication or specialized skills.
This notion is especially pertinent to sexual offenders. In fact, findings suggest quite the contrary, as sexual offenders are much more similar to other nonsexual offenders than previously thought e.
For instance, previous studies focusing on offense chain models suggested that there exists several patterns of sexual offending influenced by positive or negative background factors e. Accordingly, an important criminological question with theoretical and practical implications pertains to whether offending requires specialized skills and sophistication.
