The Limitations of Law and the Diversity of Human Beings
The classification of crime in criminal justice systems throughout the world is typi- cally conceived of as acts regarded to be breaches of the law. While the laws of a society can prescribe with comparative ease a generic constellation of behaviors that constitute a violation, and thus a crime, the underlying mechanisms that may variously
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explain the human beings who are actually adjudged and assigned these corresponding legally conceived labels is a different matter altogether. In the applied clinical practice of forensic psychiatry/psychology, the explanation of any number of offenders to the same mode of crime can potentially involve a myriad of psychological, criminologi- cal, developmental, environmental, biological, and/or cultural factors (e.g., Arrigo & Shipley, 2004; Drogin, Dattilio, Sadoff, & Gutheil, 2011; Palermo, 2004; van Marle, 2009). While legal classifications can, for example, prescribe certain behaviors as “rape” and perpetrators as “rapists,” there is considerable diversity in the forensic psychological/psychiatric assessment literature to explain why, and in what manner, a multitude of different human beings may perpetrate such behavior collectively labeled by law and the community as “rape.” However, it appears that underpinning studies into offender homology is what could also be viewed as a homogeneity assumption in operation with respect to all sampled human beings. This assumption appears to fea- ture two key dimensions. The first appears to be a perspective that all people assigned the same legal label for a crime are equivalent and comparable. Second, all human beings who are labeled as a “criminal” or an “offender” (due to the perpetration of a crime), irrespective of the mode of offence, can also in some capacity be equated and considered comparable with each other.
To be fair, it should be clearly noted that these propositions per se have never been explicitly articulated in research associated with offender homology. However, analo- gous suppositions arguably appear to permeate the study designs and thereafter gener- alizations from research into offender homology when compared with the profiling of aberrant violent crimes. Consequently, it needs to be considered whether the various homology studies may suffer from overgeneralizations in failing to appreciate the diversity of human beings in the crimes perpetrated and the coherent uniformity and robustness of the constructs supposedly being tested. It also needs to be considered to what extent such findings can be convincingly generalized. Simply put, many homol- ogy studies may feature analyses of quite diverse, heterogeneous samples of people (when considered from an applied clinical psychiatric/psychological perspective), which are unlikely to find evidence of offender homology from the outset. Moreover, regard should be had to what extent, if any, the results from a study of robbers, for example, can be validly compared and generalized with the practical context of profil- ing aberrant violent crimes such as serial sexual murderers.