Offenders’ Crime Narratives Across Different Types of Crimes

Abstract

The current study explores the roles offenders see themselves playing during an offence and their relationship to different crime types. One hundred and twenty incarcerated offenders indicated the narrative roles they acted out whilst committing a specific crime they remembered well. The data were subjected to Smallest Space Analysis (SSA) and four themes were identified: Hero, Professional, Revenger and Victim in line with the recent theoretical framework posited for Narrative Offence Roles . Further analysis showed that different subsets of crimes were more like to be associated with different narrative offence roles. Hero and Professional were found to be associated with property offences (theft, burglary and shoplifting), drug offences and robbery and Revenger and Victim were found to be associated with violence, sexual offences and murder. The theoretical implications for understanding crime on the basis of offenders' narrative roles as well as practical implications are discussed. 2In the last years, the social sciences have witnessed a strong upsurge of interest in narrative and stories as they apply to human lives and social relationships. Narrative methods have proliferated in many fields, and psychological theorists are challenged by the notion that human activity and experience are filled with "meaning". Out of this has grown the view that like literary constructions, life stories can be analyzed in terms of plots, settings, scenes,

Differentiating Contract Killers: A Narrative‐Based Approach

“…The above narrative themes have been identified in a number of previous studies, for a range of different crime types (Canter and Youngs , ; Canter, Kaouri and Ioannou ; Ioannou ; Ioannou et al . ; Youngs and Canter ). The present study aims to examine whether the Narrative Action System (NAS) (Canter and Youngs ) can also be applied to contract killing.…”

Crime location choices: A geographical analysis of German serial killers

“…However, it has been reported (Youngs, Ioannou, & Eagles, ) that specialisation is represented through expressive and instrumental offenders, although if this relates to geo‐behaviour remains unclear. It would be useful to examine the criminal narratives of these two groups of offenders as has been successfully applied in other studies (Ioannou, Canter, Youngs, & Synnott, ; Ioannou, Canter, & Youngs, ; Ioannou, Hammond, & Simpson, ; Ioannou, Synnott, Lowe, & Tzani‐Pepelasi, ; Ioannou, Synnott, Reynolds, & Pearson, ; Yaneva, Ioannou, Hammond, & Synnott, ). This would be in respect to their geographic profiles to ascertain if the lack of variation is geographic behaviour is consistent in their offender narrative.…”

The Criminal Narrative Experience of Psychopathic and Personality Disordered Offenders

“…If they are; then these items would be represented in similar regions and would provide evidence for distinct criminal narrative experiences in PD and psychopathic offenders. A number of studies from have found such MDS models to be productive in recent years (Ioannou, Canter, Youngs & Synnott 2015;Ioannou, Hammond & Simpson, 2015;Youngs, Ioannou & Eagles, 2016;Ioannou, Canter & Youngs, 2017;Ioannou, Synnott, Lowe & Tzani-Pepelasi, 2018;Yaneva, Ioannou, Hammond & Synnott, 2018, Synnott, Ioannou, Coyne & Hemingway, 2018).…”