WORKPLACE VIOLENCE TODAY
Emerging Issues in Threat Assessment and Management By James S. Cawood, CPP
Threat assessment and management, which I am defining for the purpose of this article as the process of identifying, assessing, and managing individuals that may be on a path from thought to committing a physically violent act, as practiced in the field, and as an area of professional practice, has undergone significant changes in the last 30 years. Collectively, the field and
practitioners have moved from unaided clinical and professional judgment, to structured approaches, and from a focus on ―dangerousness‖ to risk assessment and management (Hart & Logan, 2011). These changes have been driven by courts and regulatory bodies, by the empirical scientific literature, and by the expectations of the public.
The current belief and expectation is that if an opportunity exists to be more proactive in stopping violence from occurring, that should happen, rather then just clean up the aftermath.
Given this state of the field, I offer my insights on the emerging issues that I currently see from the vantage point of a long-time (30 years) international practitioner.
The first emerging issue is that this movement from unstructured processes to structured processes is happening faster in the courts and regulatory bodies, then is happening in practice, and the widening gap, if not reversed, will lead to much greater financial and reputational losses, then have been experienced by organizations and individual practitioners in the past. The release of the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals (ATAP) Risk Assessment Guideline Elements for Violence (R.A.G.E.-V.) in 2006, the first multi-disciplinary, empirically based, guideline for a valid threat assessment process, was the start of this process, and from its release, it was used by both sides of criminal and civil legal processes to attack and defend choices that had been made, where people were injured or killed. This process has continued with the release of the ASIS/SHRM Workplace Violence Assessment and Management, American National Standard (ASIS International and the Society of Human Resource Management, 2011). This document addresses the full range of threat assessment and management processes in workplace settings and provides expectations regarding policy elements, threat assessment team selection and management, use of interventions, relationships with community resources (e.g. law enforcement), and the handling of domestic violence cases. As with the R.A.G.E.-V., this document, released in 2011, was utilized immediately to attack and defend organizational decisions and practices, in relation to a variety of issues, including cases involving the injury and death of customers, clients, co-workers, and family members. The latest example of this trend toward higher standards of conduct and practice and higher expectation of effective intervention before violence, is the adoption of the new guidelines for Title IX related issues involving the tracking, investigation, and disclosure of sexual assault, stalking, and other related issues in higher educational organizations (e.g. colleges, universities, etc.) in the United States. This will require higher educational organizations to accelerate the development and more consistent use of threat assessment and management to address these issues in defensible ways.
I see this
process of higher expectations of what can and should be done, along with higher penalties for not meeting those expectations, continuing to accelerate in the foreseeable future.
Read the f ull Article *The above image is from NIOSH publication: Violence on the Job,
http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/violence/ and is being used with permission 6
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