Understanding Sexual Serial Killing

Frederick Toates · Olga Coschug-Toates

Jun 2022 · Cambridge University Press

About this ebook

Why do some people engage in serial killing for sexual pleasure? This book considers the phenomenon of sexual serial killing from the perspective of motivation theory, as advanced in psychology and neuroscience. By examining biological, psychological and social determinants, it develops a model of sexual killing that integrates widely dispersed existing literature. The first part of the book reviews scientific data and theories, while the second part presents biographical sketches of 80 sexual killers and links their early development and later killing to current theoretical understanding. The book examines cases of serial killers from the USA, Western Europe, Iran, Australia and South Africa, and it also includes an account of killers from the USSR, made available to non-Russian speakers for the first time. Deliberately written to avoid jargon, Understanding Sexual Serial Killing is accessible to students, scholars and professionals across psychology, sociology, forensic science and law.

About the author

Frederick Toates, D.Sc., is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the Open University, UK. His book How Sexual Desire Works: The Enigmatic Urge (Cambridge, 2014) won the 2015 PROSE Award for Psychology from the Association of American Publishers. His other books include Biological Psychology (2011) and Motivational Systems (Cambridge, 1986).

Olga Coschug-Toates, PhD, is a trilingual translator and interpreter with responsibilities for legal and social services and mental health translation. She was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Open University, UK, and the principal coordinator for the NATO Scientific Programme between the UK, Russia and Moldova. She co-authored Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (2002) with Frederick Toates.