Evaluating the Ontario Domestic Assault Risk Assessment in an Australian Frontline Police Setting

Abstract

This article describes a prospective validation of the Ontario Domestic Assault Risk Assessment (ODARA) in an Australian sample of 854 family violence cases presenting to police over a 5-month period in 2015. Two hundred cases met inclusion criteria for administration of the ODARA (male-to-female intimate partner violence with a history of assault and cohabitation). The ODARA performed well in predicting further intimate partner physical assault (area under the curve [AUC] = .68), and in predicting the outcome of any further police contact for nonphysical intimate partner abuse (AUC = .72). Despite these positive results, the instrument’s restrictive inclusion criteria meant that it could be appropriately applied in only 23% of family violence cases reported to police during the data collection period, limiting its practicality in this setting.

The Predictive Validity of Intimate Partner Violence Risk Assessments Conducted by Practitioners in Different Settings—a Review of the Literature

“…For instance, the structured professional judgment (SPJ) approach which is a combination of the clinical and actuarial approach (Nicholls et al 2013). The rater often uses a tool with risk factors, 1 but in addition to those, case-specific factors, if any, should be added (see for instance B-SAFER; Kropp et al 2010). The final risk assessment is based on the risk factors and the rater's judgment (Nicholls et al 2013).…”

Risk assessment of intimate partner violence in a police setting : reliability and predictive accuracy

“…However, the study by Lauria et al (2017) is the first study of the ODARA in which police officers have conducted the risk assessments. The ODARA is an actuarial risk tool and includes 13 risk factors for IPV recidivism.…”

“…Overall, the amount of training appeared to be rather limited. For instance, the police officers in the study by Lauria et al (2017) had not been given any training in the use of the ODARA. Further, the probation officers in the Shepard et al (2002) study had recommended sentences based on their offender risk categorization, and in a survey presented in the study they expressed their satisfaction regarding the training they had received in sentencing recommendations.…”

“…Five studies lacked information regarding whether or not the tools had been utilized as recommended (Hendricks et al, 2006;Hilton et al, 2010;Lauria et al, 2017;Shepard et al, 2002 7 ;Svalin et al, 2017b 8 ). One study stated that the tools' guidelines had been followed .…”

“…The highest AUC was presented by Lauria et al (2017) and related to the ODARA total scores with the outcome non-physical assault against the same victim as in the risk assessment. In total, 22 AUC values (using global risk assessments/numerical total score as test variables) were presented, with the results being evenly distributed between the highest and lowest values.…”