Question

Ethical Concerns with Psychology Profiling

Identify and discuss the ethical concerns with psychological profiling. How do you see Psychological Profiling in the future?

Answer 1

Psychological Profiling adds depth to any investigation of a crime and thus, is a tool that helps to reduce investigation workload.It helps in analysing crime scenes with the purpose of identifying offender profile characteristics.It is a guess work based on inductive and deductive process.The Ethical Concerns regarding the Psychological Profiling are:

• Lacks standardization and uniformity in practice:
  • Lacks infrastructure.
  • Lacks set of rules
  • Lacks standardized procedures
  • Lacks standards of practices
• Set of guidelines is yet to formed for profiling as it works among different disciplines the forensic, psychological, behavioral etc.
• Lacks specific educational and training requirements,hence,the competency of the professionals becomes doubtful.
• As it is based on the guess work it's reliability is always doubtful.
• Lacks scientific guidelines for the procedures.

Psychologically Profiling is still an useful aid despite of the many ethical concerns for investigation of crime,if the requirement for education and training is made ,then the competency and professionalism will have make it reliable.The setting of proper ethical guidelines and scientific approach will make it very reliable tool in the future.