ExtremismAssessing the risk of violence by extremists
A new directory has been assembled from frameworks that have been developed in recent years to assess aspects of extremist violence, a term used to encompass terrorist violence that is framed by ideology and targeted violence that is framed by idiosyncratic beliefs. A new CREST report published today provides detail on several frameworks that are used to assess risks of extremist violence.
Psychologists have been assessing violent patients or prisoners for their risk of re-offending for many years. However, the recent endeavor, of assessing the risk of individuals carrying out a first act of violence in the community, is altogether more difficult, as most approaches are predicated on the understanding that past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.
Without evidence of past violence, such assessments are informed either by intelligence that an individual is connected to a terrorist network, possibly engaged in an extremist ideology and/or potentially involved in terrorist plotting, or is nursing an idiosyncratic grievance and possibly making targeted threats of harm that may or may not be seriously intended.
More worryingly, they may not be declaring intent at all, at least not publicly, thereby successfully remaining under the radar and preserving the element of surprise.
Development of frameworks
CREST says that a new directory by Monica Lloyd has been assembled from frameworks that have been developed in recent years to assess aspects of extremist violence, a term used here to encompass terrorist violence that is framed by ideology and targeted violence that is framed by idiosyncratic beliefs.
Each of these frameworks was developed in a slightly different context, and optimized for a different purpose and group of users. The frameworks covered are: Extremist Risk Guidance (ERG22+), developed by the UK’s Prisons and Probation Service; Islamic Radicalization (IR-46), used by the Dutch National Police; Identifying Vulnerable People (IVP), developed out of open-source material on violent extremists; Multi-Level Guidelines (MLG Version 2), used in North America and Europe; Terrorist Radicalization Assessment Protocol (TRAP-18) in use since 2015 in Canada, the US and Europe and Violent Extremism Risk Assessment Version 2 Revised (VERA-2R), available in Dutch, English, French and German.
These frameworks conform, to a greater or lesser extent, to an approach that structures professional judgment from a number of potential indicators of risk derived from clinical and correctional research and practice, with the exception of the IVP framework that consists of a checklist for the assessment of escalating behaviors that open source research suggests correspond with more serious intent and/or imminence of attack.
None of these frameworks claims to be able to straightforwardly predict future violence. In accordance with good practice in risk assessment, most claim instead to be able to identify behaviours or scenarios that signal when and in what circumstances an attack is more likely, in order to prevent it through appropriate action.
Each is presented as a work in progress, within a standard template that allows for some comparison across frameworks, together with an appraisal of their strengths and limitations, informed by the comments of peer reviewers and users.
— Read more in Monica Lloyd, Extremism Risk Assessment: A Directory (Full Report) (CREST, 2019)
