A panoramic view to the state-of-the-art of violence risk assessment research in Latin-America

Abstract

Since the seminal work of John Monahan more than three decades ago (1981), research on violence risk assessment and the development of instruments to structure this task have advanced by leaps and bounds in countries of America and Northern Europe (Mills, 2017; Otto & Douglas, 2010). In the Spanish-speaking context, Spain has been the main reference in the development and adoption of specific instruments for assessing the risk of violence within its institutions (Arbach-Lucioni & Andrés-Pueyo, 2016). As a region, Latin America has contributed rigorous studies in this area of research (Folino, 2015), but knowledge of these does not seem to have spread in professional practice (Arbach et al., 2017; Goldstein et al., 2015). Current debates on aspects of violence risk management (e.g., Webster, Haque, & Hucker, 2014) will not be able to progress in this region as long as there is no advance in the practices of violence risk assessment. In addition to reviewing the state-of-the-art of violence risk assessment research in Latin America, this communication presents two novel examples of gradual progress in this area. Firstly, the results are discussed of a study on the inter-rater reliability and criteria validity of the Spanish version of the HCR-20V3 (Douglas et al., 2015) in a sample of 15 men admitted to an Argentinian forensic psychiatric unit. Preliminary results are also presented of the first longitudinal study in Latin America on the predictive validity of the Spanish version of SARA (Kropp et al., 2004) in a forensic sample of 128 intimate partner aggressors. The implications of these studies for advancing research on violence risk assessment in the region are discussed and some challenges that arise for research in Latin America are defined.