Forensic Psychology For Dummies (131 page)
Read Forensic Psychology For Dummies Online
Authors: David Canter
Predicting domestic violence
The Spousal Assault Risk Assessment Guide (SARA) is a standard set of 20 items that provide a checklist developed specifically to predict the likelihood of violence against family members or others. Tribunals and review boards use SARA when making decisions about individual cases.
The guide consists of four scales:
Spousal assault history:
Considering violence that has occurred within the family in the past and the circumstances in which that happened.
The amount and nature of previous crimes the individual has committed.
Careful consideration of the activities that brought the person to notice for the review.
Examination of how the person has related to others in a variety of situations and any indications of particular personality problems.
Clinicians using SARA are encouraged to also use their judgements to augment the results of the scale.
The association of domestic violence, harassment and murder
The sportsman and media star O.J. Simpson divorced Nicole Brown in 1992. In 1994, Nicole and her friend, Ron Goldman, were found murdered. O.J. was charged with the murders. It emerged during his trial that he’d been violent to Nicole on several occasions. The police were called out to their home at least nine times and in 1989 he’d been convicted of spousal assault. For several months after the couple separated, O.J. waited outside her new home, called her to persuade her that they needed to work things out, brought her flowers and left them on her doorstep, and went to neighbourhood restaurants they’d previously used in the hope of seeing her.
O.J. Simpson was eventually acquitted of the murder charges but was ordered, in the subsequent civil case in 1997, to pay $33.5 million to the relatives of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman. He subsequently wrote a book called
If I Did It,
which somewhat ambiguously implies that he may well have committed the murders.This illustrates how violence can build up from a failed relationship with many occurrences over time and be the end result of stalking that I discuss later in ‘Managing Stalking’.
Assessing the Risk of Future Violence
The legal and therapeutic processes contain many aspects that seek to determine whether a person is dangerous. The concept of ‘dangerousness’, however, is rather difficult to define, because it implies an all or nothing categorisation, and so instead experts consider the
probability
that a person may be violent in the future. As a result, risk assessment has become a very common activity for forensic psychologists.
(I mention risk assessment as it relates to general re-offending briefly in Chapter 10, but such assessments are so fundamental to dealing with violent offenders that I consider the subject in more detail in this chapter.)
Forensic psychologists can be requested to produce predictions of the risk of future violence at many stages in the legal process: