Forensic Psychology For Dummies (5 page)

Chapter 1

Discovering the Truth about Forensic Psychology

In This Chapter

Figuring out what forensic psychology is and isn’t

Seeing where forensic psychology happens

Understanding how forensic psychologists know what they know

Finding out who forensic psychologists work with

If you think that you know what forensic psychology is, this chapter may well have a few surprises in store. The abundance of police movies, TV series and crime novels give you a great picture of what forensic psychologists do – sometimes wrongly. Yes, police movies and TV series are truly criminal in content, but often only in terms of their inaccuracies and simplifications! Forensic psychology is an ambitious and diverse discipline and in this chapter I take a look at some specifics of the profession to sort out the reality from the fiction.

Whatever activity a forensic psychologist is involved in, he’s arriving at logical conclusions using systematic, scientific procedures. The forensic psychologist’s work is founded as much as possible on objective research, which isn’t always easy to do for reasons I discuss in this chapter.

Grasping What Forensic Psychology Is Not

You know the typical crime movie plot, which goes something along the following lines: the detectives in the film are stumped (you’d have no plot if they found the criminal sitting crying at the crime scene). The serial killer has killed again (why are most killers in films serial killers?) and the pressure is on to find him (or more rarely, her). Enter the forensic psychologist, usually grudgingly, just when he’s having enough problems, with drink, his girlfriend, or both. He visits the crime scene and magically knows what the murderer was thinking, why he killed, and how the police can catch him. But the killer refuses to talk, and so the heroic forensic psychologist settles down for an intellectual battle of wits leading to the criminal revealing all. (Along the way of course the forensic psychologist loses custody of his darling daughter, his girlfriend walks out on him again, and he returns to the bottle.)

I’m no scriptwriter, but I’m sure the scene is familiar to you. Well, as this book and this chapter shows, the typical crime storyline has more to do with Conan Doyle’s fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, and all the well-known fictional sleuths following in his footsteps, than with the work of the present-day forensic psychologist.

Often, the best way of understanding the details of a professional activity is to clear the area around the profession and so establish what it’s not. This approach is particularly important for forensic psychology, which shares friendly, neighbourly relationships with many other areas and professions. You’d certainly be forgiven for thinking, for example, that forensic psychology is the same as criminology.

Journalists mistakenly often refer to me as a criminologist, even though I’m no expert on changes in the pattern of crime over the centuries or between different countries, and I know little about the effects of different forms of punishment on the prevalence of crimes or the effectiveness of different crime prevention strategies.

I know only a little about crime as a general area, but have spent my entire career as a forensic psychologist taking a lot of interest in criminals. And yet, as a forensic psychologist, I may criticise general considerations of how to cut crime or treat offenders, but journalists generally have little understanding about what I know about how criminals act and think.

Forensic psychologists don’t:

Study broad trends in criminality.

Examine how the legal system works.

Solve crimes.