Expert witness update: The psychology of predicting violence

• Covers different types of violence risk assessment, and shows why the SPJ approach is superior.
• Offers advice on instructing risk assessment professionals.
• Highlights risks for solicitors who make a poor choice when instructing an expert risk assessment professional.

Risk assessments are often commissioned in both criminal and family cases, looking at the risk of physical violence, sexual violence and domestic abuse. But what’s the science behind them, and who should be doing them and who shouldn’t? We decided to write this article because of concerns about the quality of these assessments that we’ve seen in our practice as expert psychologists.

The purpose of a risk assessment is to help the court decide whether someone poses a risk—of what, to what degree, in what circumstances, and to whom, and, crucially, to ‘develop interventions to manage or reduce that risk’ (Boer, Hart, Kropp and Webster