Perpetrator may refer to:
*Someone who committed a
crime
In ordinary language, a crime is an unlawful act punishable by a state or other authority. The term ''crime'' does not, in modern criminal law, have any simple and universally accepted definition,Farmer, Lindsay: "Crime, definitions of", in Ca ...
*
Suspect
In law enforcement jargon, a suspect is a known person accused or suspected of committing a crime. Police and reporters in the United States often use the word suspect as a jargon when referring to the perpetrator of the offense (perp in dated ...
of committing a crime
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Perpetrators, victims, and bystanders, a typology in genocide studies
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Perpetrator studies Perpetrator studies is a nascent interdisciplinary, scholarly field of research into the perpetrators of mass killings and/or political violence. It is covered in ''Journal of Perpetrator Research'' and other publications.
Anthropologists, historia ...
, the academic study of perpetrators of political violence
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