Dr C. Gabrielle Salfati
Course Director, MSc Forensic Behavioural Science
tel:+ 44 151 794 3910
email: g.salfati@liverpool.ac.uk

John Jay College of Criminal Justice
http://web.jjay.cuny.edu/~gsalfati/

Biography

Dr C. Gabrielle Salfati is a Lecturer in the Centre for Investigative Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Liverpool and the Course Director for the M.Sc. in Forensic Behavioral Science. Her main areas of expertise are homicide and sexual offences, in particular with reference to offender profiling, classifications of violent crime and cross-cultural comparisons.

She is currently working on a number of interrelated projects dealing with various facets of violent crime and deviance. The main focus of this work centres on homicide, sexual violence, and other aggressive interpersonal crimes. In particular, this work is now being developed within an international framework through collaboration with major research centres across Europe as well as North America.

Research in the area of homicide focuses primarily on the issue of classification of homicide based on the actions the offender engages in at the crime scene, the characteristics of victims, and the characteristics of offenders. This work relates to parallel projects looking at the issues of the development and the consistency of violent behaviour across an offender's criminal career and other aspects of their non-criminal lives. This work also explores the narratives of offenders who have committed homicide. The main objective of this research is to establish a sound methodological and scientific basis for police decision making tools such as Offender Profiling.

On-going related research in the area of sexual violence involves studies dealing with sexual crimes such as sexual homicide and sexual assaults, comparing them on underlying motivational, and behavioural trends. The focus is on identifying the differences and similarities of various subgroups of sexual offenders, such as adult offenders, young offenders, and offenders with learning disabilities or mental disorders.

Dr Salfati has presented and published widely both nationally and internationally on her work, and guest edited a special journal issue on Homicide Research in Europe (see

www.sagepub.co.uk for further details) for the journal Homicide Studies. She is on the Board of Editors of a number of academic journals, is a chartered psychologist with the British Psychological Society, a member of the American Society of Criminology, and a member of the European Society of Criminology. She is also actively involved with the US-based Homicide Research Working Group (http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/NACJD/HRWG/), and is one of the Board Members of the European Homicide Research Group.

 

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