Perceptions of Homicide

As is inherent in the preceding quotation, crimes of serious violence, especially when they appear as seemingly random and motiveless events, have the ability to incite fears within individuals from a wide spectrum of society. These offenses are sometimes conceptualized as episodes of “random violence,” an evocative term that conjures fear-provoking images of patternless chaos and of victims selected at random by seemingly indiscriminate perpetrators.

To this extent, the contemplation of indiscriminate violence in society engenders great fear, and concern about motiveless, senseless violence has become a pervasive theme in contemporary culture and the crimes it plays spectacle to. Underlying these fears are schemata and prototypes of offenders, offenses, and categories of crime: crimes such as serial murder, terrorism, sexual predation, stalking, and other seemingly unpredictable threats. Often, these are crimes with a seemingly intrinsic locus of motives that may make sense to the perpetrator but not to others. This pervasive fear is also representative of a worldview in which no one is considered safe: the prospect of what Egger (1997) deems the unknown “killers among us” striking at random, proving an omnipotent and cogent threat to one's continued existence.

It is likely that the general public, when exposed to such crimes, also searches for rational explanations. Crimes of violence are thus likely to elicit attributional search. This is not surprising, as it has been evidenced that the search for causal understanding (the perceived reasons as to why an event/act has occurred) is most commonly provoked by three factors: the extent to which acts or actions are perceived as negative or aversive, whether or not they are unexpected, and whether they have symbolic importance or tap cultural concerns. Crimes involving serious violence clearly contain such underlying properties.

People thus seek to comprehend why these offenders act as they do and what it is about these types of criminals that enables them to engage in such activities. As such, these crimes are particularly conducive to attributional analyses. Surprisingly though, little empirical research has been conducted into causal explanations held by the public concerning crimes of serious violence. These explanations are of utmost importance, considering that to a large extent how we think about social problems likely shapes the manner in which we seek to address them.