Dynamics of choosing a victim as an informative characteristic in developing a psychological profile of a serial sexual offender

The paper considers the perspectives of using psychological profiling as a new and controversial trend of the psychological support of professional law enforcement. The study shows that many researchers of the subject doubt the effectiveness of this method due to the lack of theoretical and methodological foundations of psychological profiling as a method in general and specific procedures of developing a psychological profile of a criminal in particular. The authors have distinguished and analyzed the major problems associated with this method, including little information content in terms of practical criminal investigations, uncertainty of content and functional load of basic concepts such as model, portrait and profile of a criminal, and lack of clear goals and objectives for profilers. In particular, this results in attempts to reject psychological profiling and use criminal profiling instead. The paper provides a critical analysis of such approaches. The authors have previously suggested a distinction between the concepts of model, portrait and profile of an offender in terms of their content and functional load...