Current Directions in Violence Risk Assessment

Over recent years, a variety of instruments that improve clinicians' ability to forecast the likelihood that an individual will behave violently have been published. Increasingly, these instruments are being applied in response to laws that require specialized risk assessments. In this article, we present a framework that goes beyond the clinical and actuarial dichotomy to describe a continuum of structured approaches to risk assessment. Despite differences among validated instruments, there is little evidence that one predicts violence better than another. We believe that these group-based instruments are useful for assessing an individual's risk and that an instrument should be chosen based on an evaluation's purpose (i.e., risk assessment vs. risk reduction). The time is ripe to shift attention from predicting violence to understanding its causes and preventing its (re)occurrence.