Risk Assessment
Risk assessment in the Domestic Violence field is the structured attempt to estimate a victim’s danger — especially of serious or lethal harm — so that advocates, police, and courts can prioritise resources. The best-known instruments emerged in 1990s North America. Jacquelyn Campbell’s Danger Assessment was built specifically to predict intimate partner homicide, weighting factors such as escalating violence, threats with a weapon, strangulation, and an abuser’s access to firearms. The DASH (Domestic Abuse, Stalking and Honour-based violence) checklist is used by UK police as a frontline screening tool, while the ODARA (Ontario Domestic Assault Risk Actuarial) predicts the likelihood and severity of future assault by a known male offender. These tools correlate with one another but measure different things — recidivism is not lethality, and ODARA’s developers caution it was not built to predict homicide.
The literature is candid about limits. Most validation has been done by the tools’ own developers, on relatively small, mostly-white samples; a high-profile study (“Dashing Hopes?”) found that police DASH judgements predicted future harm only weakly. For this vault the relevance is that risk assessment is increasingly embedded in Personal Safety Apps and AI Distress Detection, where an actuarial logic gets automated and detached from the advocate’s judgement it was meant to support. Done well it can centre a Victim-Survivor’s safety planning; done badly it lends a false numerical authority to decisions about Intimate Partner Violence.
In this vault
- SupportsVictim-Survivor
- Related toIntimate Partner Violence
- Part ofPersonal Safety Apps
- Tension withAI Distress Detection