Dr Katarina Fritzon

Katarina is originally from the UK and joined Bond University in 2005. She is a Registered Psychologist with AHPRA and has practice endorsements in Clinical and Forensic Psychology. She is also a Chartered Forensic Psychologist in the UK.

Her PhD was in the Psychology of Malicious Fire setting, and she has undertaken both clinical and investigative work in the area of arson. She was an accredited Behavioural Investigative Adviser with the National Crime Faculty in the UK and provided assistance to over 30 police investigations of arson. She completed her Chartership training at Broadmoor Special Hospital where she was involved in setting up one of the UKs first treatment programs for arsonists.

Katarina’s research has contributed to theoretical development of models of understanding criminal behaviour, with a specific focus on differentiating criminal actions within the broader framework of Faceted Action Systems Theory (FAST) (Shye, 1985). The original forensic application of the FAST framework was to actions associated with fire setting (Canter and Fritzon, 1998) and evidence for the applicability of this framework for understanding a variety of different criminal behaviours has been found in studies of school homicides (Fritzon and Brun, 2005), intrafamilial homicide (Fritzon and Garbutt, 2001) and terrorist hostage taking (Fritzon, Canter and Wilton, 2001).