Forensic Psychology For Dummies (133 page)
Read Forensic Psychology For Dummies Online
Authors: David Canter
Understanding the risks of risk assessment
If, as a forensic psychologist, you’re asked to say whether a person is dangerous, a lot of pressure is on you to say, ‘Well, yes, I suppose so.’ After all, the individual’s name hasn’t been pulled out of a hat at random, so some background applies to make people suspicious. And if you say that the person is dangerous, people accept that and the person is kept under observation, or even lock and key, which may reduce the risk of him being violent. On the one hand, if he’s violent, you can say, ‘I told you so,’ and on the other hand, if you say, ‘he’s a nice chap, I’m sure we won’t have any trouble with him,’ and later he acts violently then you look like an idiot and someone else suffers.
The risk of the risk assessment being wrong is therefore much greater if you say that no risk exists than if you say risk does exist.
Therefore, experts are very cautious when making risk assessments, and tend to err on the side of saying that the person does present a risk. Studies of how often people have been violent when it was predicted they would be have shown that far fewer were violent than was predicted. This either supports the notion that experts were over-cautious or that a prediction of violence is a good way to reduce the chance of people being violent in the future!
Standardised risk assessment procedures
A number of standard procedures have been developed for assessing risk and are now widely used. Here are brief details of two of them:
The
Historical/Clinical/Risk Management Scale
(HCR-20) is particularly useful for considering people with psychiatric or personality disorders. It contains 20 questions relating to:
The person’s background and previous experiences (historical)
The
Violence Risk Appraisal Guide
(VRAG)
aims to predict whether a person will be violent if released into the community over a number of years. It covers 12 issues, including:
This guide assigns a person to one of nine categories, with category 1 indicating a very low likelihood of future violence and category 9 indicating an almost certain probability of violence within the following seven years.
Keeping people locked up to protect the reputation of experts is a serious matter, which is why recent moves have been made towards using objective assessment procedures like those I describe in the sidebar ‘Standardised risk assessment procedures’. Even though they aren’t foolproof, at least the basis of the decision can be seen to be honest and independent of the expert’s subjective opinion.
Appreciating the difficulties of risk assessment
People with a propensity for violence are some of the most difficult individuals to deal with as regards providing therapy or treatment, and they’re very likely to refuse to participate in any assessment procedure. However, the procedures listed in the nearby sidebar ‘Standardised risk assessment procedures’ can be completed without the person answering questions, by drawing on records of their behaviour and talking to those who’ve dealt with them. Such an approach, however, isn’t ideal and any lack of co-operation and the consequent necessary degree of speculation involved needs to be made clear in any reports.
Considering Some Approaches to Treatment
In this section, I take a look at some treatment programmes for violent offenders that address anger issues and help to re-orientate unhelpful personal narratives. As I state in the preceding section, people with violent histories are often reluctant to participate in any assessment process and are well-known for being very challenging when trying to carry out treatment with them. Compared with other offenders they are: