Researchers Develop A New Risk Assessment

      Police officers often say their most dreaded assignments are "domestics." Officers often find themselves repeatedly called to the same home where they face "he-said she-said" situations. Perhaps due to the extreme conflict, officers are sometimes injured when dealing with domestics. Arresting the man and laying charges may result in the case being dismissed if the couple is together and the court perceives no risk. On the other hand, officers who failed to remove a perpetrator would be vulnerable to accusations that they ignored the victim's safety, especially if the violence were repeated or, even worse, homicide later occurred.

      Despite over two decades of attention to domestic violence, there has not been a validated way for front-line officers to assess the risk posed by an assaultive husband. The Violence Risk Appraisal Guide accurately predicts violence by men who have assaulted their wives, but this recidivism is not necessarily directed towards a spouse. Also, the VRAG requires detailed psychological information. Front-line officers need an accurate actuarial assessment using information they could easily access, and which can be easily shared with prosecutors and courts.

      In 2000, members of our Research team partnered with the Behavioural Sciences Section (BSS) of the Ontario Provincial Police. The BSS is responsible for assisting OPP investigators with difficult cases by conducting criminal profiling and risk assessment, and is the Ontario repository for ViCLAS, the national register of serious crimes. Meanwhile, the Research Department is known for scientific research on crime, violence, mental disorder, and prediction. These naturally complemented each other. The collaboration was also partly responded to the May-Isles murder-suicide inquest. In 2001, the partnership, headed by Dr. Zoe Hilton, was awarded a quarter-million-dollar grant by the federal government to develop risk assessments for wife assault recidivism. The funds also support research on the mental health problems of women assaulted by their spouses. When a second domestic murder inquest raised questions about risk assessment, our collaboration was able to provide some answers.

      The first result is the Ontario Domestic Assault Risk Assessment (ODARA) which recently won an award from Ontario Women in Law Enforcement. The actuarial ODARA predicts which wife assaulters will repeat wife assault, and does so with greater accuracy than other assessments. The ODARA also predicts the number of incidents and the severity of injuries caused. The accuracy of the ODARA is similar to that of the VRAG, but the ODARA uses only information available to officers responding to a domestic occurrence. The ODARA will be useful in assessing the risk posed by men who have just assaulted their wives to inform decisions about arrest, detention, and bail. Our BSS partners have received funding for the "roll out" package to all of the OPP. This is an opportunity to study one of the toughest puzzles facing applied researchers - how to translate established scientific findings into useful practice.

      The ODARA was developed using about 600 cases and its accuracy was verified on a hundred additional new cases. Altogether, the project has now studied about 1500 cases of wife assault and all the data will be used to develop an in-depth assessment, perhaps using the Psychopathy Checklist or information about offenders' juvenile history, even more accurate than the ODARA. This future assessment could be used in making decisions about prosecution, sentencing, and parole. Of course, we will also use these data to study why men assault their wives in the first place, analyzing them to test explanations of wife assault.

      The final aspect of this project involves the physical and especially the mental health consequences for victims of wife assault. Women assaulted by their husbands often experience serious psychological problems - depression, anxiety, and post traumatic stress. We will work with several Ontario hospitals (in Orillia, Cornwall, and perhaps Mississauga and York Region) to study these problems. We expect the data collection for this research program to continue until 2005. We are also exploring collaboration with researchers at the McMaster Faculty of Health Sciences, funded by the Ontario Women's Health Council, who are studying the identification of and health care responses to domestic violence. Whatever we find, MHCP Researchers are proud of the partnership with the OPP BSS as a good example of innovative, inter-ministry cooperation tackling important problems facing Ontario citizens.