Treatment of Sex Offenders

4 Risk Formulation: The New Frontier in Risk Assessment and Management
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Victim Safety Planning
Finally, victim safety planning refers to the action that might be recommended to a
past or possible future victim of the client—and his or her carers or guardians—in
order to keep them safe. The client may have targeted a potential future victim previously
(e.g. their child), but contact is nonetheless possible and desired by the parties
involved (e.g. both parents, who choose to stay in some kind of contact with one
another because they have several children together). A potential victim could also
be an as yet unknown partner (e.g. a future boyfriend or girlfriend) or provider of
treatment or supervision (e.g. a social worker or probation officer, a psychologist)
who may become victimised when, for example, they make demands of the client or
endeavour to enforce the limitations that were an agreed requirement of conditional
release. Victim safety plans should include provision of emergency safety procedures,
personal alarms, prohibition of unaccompanied meetings, communication
strategies, and so on, all of which are intended to make victimisation either less
likely to happen or less damaging in its effects.
Concluding Comments
In this section, the SPJ process has been described in some detail. SPJ should be
regarded as evidence-based guidelines for risk assessment and management that are
tailored to the needs of individual clients, to the practitioners who work with them
over lengthy periods of time, and to the harmful conduct to be prevented. The SPJ
approach to risk assessment and management is most applicable to practice settings
in which convicted sexual offenders are subject to long-term treatment and supervision,
in institutions or in the community (such as correctional or forensic mental
health facilities), and in legal contexts where risk management is a primary consideration
(e.g. parole board hearings). However, assessment is not understanding, and
risk management that is not based on an understanding of the problems experienced
by the client in trying to manage his or her own behaviour is at risk of being poorly
designed and executed. It is therefore to risk formulation that we will now turn.
Risk Formulation
Formulation is the process in clinical and forensic practice whereby an organisational
framework is applied to our current knowledge of a client in order to produce
an explanation for the underlying mechanism of his or her presenting problems and
thereby generate linked hypotheses for action that will facilitate positive and progressive
change (e.g. Johnstone & Dallos, 2013 ; Persons, 1989 ; Sturmey &
McMurran, 2011 ; Tarrier, 2006 ). The knowledge to which the formulation process
is applied is the collection of that gleaned from clinical interviews and direct