Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a global public health issue, where every third woman has been a victim of such violence. One way to combat IPV is to perform risk assessment with a subsequent risk management. There is a knowledge gap on what types of risk management work and for whom.This is further complicated due to the need for collaboration between police, social service and other agencies. To this end police and social service perform structured risk assessments, although different ones and separately. Furthermore, the subsequent risk management is unstructured, which includes lack of routines for collaboration and documentation. These shortcomings also make it difficult to evaluate the preventive effect of the protective actions. We have developed a structured risk management model, the RISKSAM, for collaboration within and between agencies working with IPV, based on our results of longitudinal studies of the police work in Sweden. The aim of this presentation is twofold; first we present findings from our project on how risk management have been conducted by the police, and second we will introduce the RISKSAM model.
The results show that few victims were provided with risk management, mainly due to lack of resources. Moreover, since the police only have a few different risk management strategies to use, of which the security talk is the most prevalent one, the problem is more how to prioritise cases with high risk for future violence. Problems also arise when police and social services assess the risk from different perspectives, which leads to different levels of priority of the case. This highlights the need for a structured risk 138 Tuesday, June 11 management model supporting them to collaborate in deciding on adequate risk management for the victim. The RISKSAM will attempt to solve these issues and to provide a common structure that will facilitate multi agency collaboration.