DyRiAS
What is DyRiAS?
- No checklist, no psychological testing
- Behavior-orientated assessment
- Recognition of risk patterns
- Provides confidence in risk assessment
- Prevents prejudiced results
- Up to date with the latest scientific findings at all times
DyRiAS is based on the finding that a serious targeted act of violence is always the end point of an escalating pathway. This pathway is lined with distinctive features of the behavior and the communication of the later offender. DyRiAS captures such warning signals and on this basis carries out an assessment of the question of whether or not a pathway to a possible serious act of violence can be identified and how far an individual of concern has already advanced on this pathway.
DyRiAS is committed to the philosophy of psychological threat assessment. It is not the aim of threat assessment to predict violence, but to prevent it. Therefore, no categorical assessment is made of whether an individual of concern is violent or not, as this would imply a far too static concept of risk. Instead, it is assessed whether or not an individual has started on a pathway that may possibly lead to an attack. Violence is not understood as a personality trait but as a phenomenon that develops from the interplay of offender, victim, and situational factors. Therefore, DyRiAS does not work with standardized offender profiles, but regards risk assessment as a dynamic process which needs to be updated regularly as a case evolves.
The ultimate goal is to prevent violence, not to predict it. Early identification of an evolving risk is aimed at preventing an escalation process.
DyRiAS provides you with the confidence of working at a state-of-the-art level of risk prognosis and relevant scientific research.
Questions guide you through the programs. For every question, you are supplied with detailed background information. This is provided by videos of experts who talk about the topic in question, examples of actual cases as well as scientific background information. Also, you can print out an intelligence gathering sheet which allows you to follow the individual questions during a personal interview.
You can assess an unlimited number of cases. In addition, it is possible to reassess each case over time and, in this way, identify any change in the given risk of escalation. This procedure captures the dynamic course of cases involving a threatening situation.
At a first level, the risk report presents an overall assessment of the question of whether there is currently a mild, moderate or high risk of serious violence. At a deeper level, it presents a detailed presentation of the actual risk profile, i.e. of the factors that indicate an increased risk in a given case. As the DyRiAS user is requested to enter a descriptive account of the given case-related situation for each risk factor, a case documentation is always available (e.g. "The individual of concern reports that her former partner has repeatedly mentioned suicide in conversations”; "A friend reports that the student of concern repeatedly mentioned suicide in conversations.") DyRiAS allows you to open a given case file at any time and to change the input to the risk factors. In this way, a progress report can be generated that outlines the way in which the risk of violence has developed over time and whether it has increased or decreased.
After information has been entered, a risk report is automatically generated and made available to the user in PDF format. This shows that DyRiAS is neither a check list nor a psychological test, but rather a behavior-based assessment tool. The individual risk factors are not simply added up but are captured in complex interrelations and are analyzed with the help of statistical methods.