Murder and Serious Sexual Assault - Lancaster EPrints - Lancaster ...

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
would be shared, at most, by only one in fifty of each of our target groups.
Nevertheless, this focus on all murderers or all those convicted of SSA could be
misleading. An unusual previous criminal history may have special importance in a
particular social (or criminological) context. Hence, it is twelve times as likely that a
man with a previous manslaughter conviction will be subsequently convicted of the
murder of a family member; that a man with a blackmail conviction will be
subsequently convicted of the murder of an acquaintance; or that a man with a
kidnapping conviction will be subsequently convicted of the murder of a stranger
male victim. Finally, understanding the context of murder and SSA has been largely
beyond the scope of this project but this is clearly an area worth further examination.
There are a number of challenges in interpreting these findings. Are ‘risk factors’
causative or correlative? Does the fact that someone convicted of blackmail is five
times as likely than the general offender to be eventually convicted of some kind of
murder mean that committing the offence of blackmail has somehow ‘caused’ the
eventual murder? A distinction needs to be made between what can be termed as
‘indicators’ and ‘precursors’. This distinction is similar to the classic distinction
between ‘causes’ and ‘correlates’. ‘Indicators’ are simply pointers or, as one
dictionary definition suggests, ‘any device for considering condition for the time
being’. In contrast, ‘precursors’ are more directly related to future behaviour or,
again as a dictionary suggests, ‘a forerunner; a predecessor; an indication of the
approach of an event’.
Without perhaps distorting too much, indicators indicate the present, while
precursors give more of a hint of the future. Precursors are much more closely
connected to the eventual event, in this case, murder. With this study we can only
really speculate, for it needs other, more detailed data sources, to confirm or
challenge this observation. If a person has been convicted of kidnapping in the past
and then commits another kidnapping which ends up in a murder, we would argue
that the first kidnapping conviction could be seen as a precursor to the
kidnapping/murder. It is not causative in the conventional sense, although some of
the ingredients of the eventual outcome might be identified in the earlier offence.
In contrast, some other crimes related to eventual murder or SSA may simply
‘indicate’ future serious offending. ‘Indicators’ provide indications of a particular
lifestyle that may or may not be permanent.
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