Prison Interviews with Male Stranger Rapists: Complementary Information to Behavioural Profiles

• In Event: Roundtable: Male Stranger Rapists--Profiles and Spatial Patterns of Sexual Aggression in Spain

Abstract

Male stranger rape is generally studied using police information, mostly coming from the victim. During the police investigation and the judicial process the majority of sex offenders decline to declare, so we don’t usually have information from the author. As a consequence, sex offender profiles are built lacking information from the perpetrator. The goal of this paper is to present the information obtained from prison interviews with male stranger rapists. We have performed more than 50 semi-structured interviews conducted by a psychologist of the research team. During the interview we have explored the family background, school performance, peer group, drug use, partner and sexual relationships, sexual offence, psychological treatment in prison, social support and future plans. Our results show that limited information is obtained from this source: the main problem detected is the lack of veracity on many answers, which were often contradictory with information included in the sentence. We will discuss the implication of these findings in building sex offender profiles.

Authors

• Meritxell Perez Ramirez, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid

• Andrea Gimenez-Salinas Framis, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid