Criminal Profiling: Separating Fact From Fiction

Online, July 8, 2011 (Newswire.com) - The phenomenal success of the film The Silence of The Lambs in the early 1990s helped perpetuate the myth that psychology and forensic psychology in particular is primarily concerned with attempting to understand and profile the behavior of psychopathic serial offenders.

Evaluating psychological impressions at a crime scene and generating a behavioral composite to reveal the key personality characteristics and motives of an unknown offender has become a staple ingredient of many other popular films and TV series e.g., criminal minds. It is not surprising, therefore, that many people not only incorrectly assume that forensic psychology is mostly concerned with criminal profiling but also that most forensic psychologists act as criminal profilers in the course of their work and that criminal profiling is a realistic career choice for a forensic psychology graduate.

David Webb, Host and writer of the All About Forensic Psychology website knows from his time as a lecturer in forensic psychology how important it is to quickly establish the facts regarding criminal profiling.

"The first thing I got my students to do was write down what they thought forensic psychology was...this was fine until I mentioned that they were not allowed to include the words serial killers or silence of the lambs, at which point most of the writing stopped!"

The advice it would seem, therefore, especially if you are considering doing a forensic psychology degree, is to ensure that you understand what forensic psychology is from an academic perspective; as you will then be able to begin exploring the compelling world of criminal profiling free of ambiguity and misapprehension.

So what are you waiting for? Head over to the All About Forensic Psychology website (www.all-about-forensic-psychology.com) and make the what is forensic psychology page your first port of call. Then take a look at the various criminal profiling pages.

Finally, don't forget to check out the Criminal Profiling on Kindle collection, which consists primarily of the landmark articles written by members of the Behavioral Science Units, National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, at the FBI Academy. These seminal publications in the history of FBI profiling were released by the U.S. Department of Justice as part of the information on serial killers provided by the FBI's Training Division.

You can access this engrossing collection of articles Here.