Serial Sex Offenders: Article Analysis

ARTICLE THREE I chose the article, A Descriptive Model of the Hunting Process of Serial Sex Offenders: A Rational Choice Perspective by Beauregard, Rossmo, & Proulx (2007) for a number of reasons. First, as an undergraduate student I took a victimology class where we studied sex offenders. We each chose a serial sex offender and completed research on that offender throughout the semester. I was able to learn a tremendous amount of knowledge from that assignment, I believe that not only is every subgroup of offenders diverse within the criminal justice system, however serial sex offenders are the most commonly unresearched. Therefore, whenever I can find literature on this subject I want to explore it even more. Further, we have learned a

The descriptive model included nice different phases that the researchers incorporated. These phases were offender routine activities and victim routine activities, finding a hunting ground, selection of a particular victim, how to approach the victim, how to choose the location of the attack, how to bring the victim to the crime location site, the choice of the crime site, the commission of the crime, and the release location of the victim. By using all of these phases the researchers set out to explore crime from the offenders perspective. By using this sort of approach to answer the research question, the researchers wanted to understand the decision making process that this type of subpopulation of criminals used. This type of research has not been done on this type of offender; mostly this theory is applied to less violent

The descriptions provided by the offenders satisfied this requirement. Then quantitative measures were used such as clustering to look at the possible relationships behind the criminal behavior and possible geographic location of the hunting ground. Further, as mentioned above the sole data for this research was gained by the self-reports that were given based off memory of the offender. Also, there were a number of variables that were being studied, as mentioned the nine phases above were all looked into based on the retrospective reports given by the offenders. Another, variable that the researchers included was the inclusion of a weapon in the commission of the crime. Finally, there is no treatment tested in this