The Ontario Domestic Assault Risk Assessment: Predicting Violence Among Men With a Police Record of Intimate Partner Violence in the United States

• Date: 01 March 2022
• Published date: 01 March 2022
• DOI: 10.1177/00938548211035816
• Subject Matter: Articles

CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND BEHAVIOR, 2022, Vol. 49, No. 3, March 2022, 371 –388.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/00938548211035816

Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions

© 2021 International Association for Correctional and Forensic Psychology

371

THE ONTARIO DOMESTIC ASSAULT RISK

ASSESSMENT

Predicting Violence Among Men With a Police Record

of Intimate Partner Violence in the United States

DANA L. RADATZ

Niagara University

N. ZOE HILTON

University of Toronto

Waypoint Centre for Mental Health Care

The Ontario Domestic Assault Risk Assessment (ODARA) is an actuarial risk assessment tool for intimate partner violence

(IPV) recidivism. Despite its international use, there is no published validation of the ODARA’s predictive accuracy in a U.S.

sample. We studied 356 men in New York police records of IPV against a female partner to examine the ODARA’s predictive

accuracy for IPV recidivism (base rate 35%), non-IPV violent recidivism (against a nonpartner; 16%), any violent recidivism

(49%), and nonviolent recidivism (50%), in a fixed 2-year follow-up. Using 11 scorable ODARA items, area under the curve

values were significant and ranged from .590 to .630, indicating small to medium effects. Expected/Observed indices

revealed poor calibration with 2-year IPV recidivism rates in ODARA construction and cross-validation samples. Findings

support the generalization of the ODARA’s predictive accuracy in different populations and outcomes, but a need for new

norm development for higher risk populations.

Keywords: ODARA; intimate partner violence; IPV; domestic violence; calibration recidivism; violence

Cases of assault or other violence against an intimate partner (intimate partner violence,

or IPV) have grown to represent a substantial proportion of the criminal justice system

caseload in the United States and Canada (Hilton & Ennis, 2020). In Canada, IPV accounts

AUTHORS’ NOTE: N. Zoe Hilton is an author of the ODARA and declares a financial interest in a publication

cited in this manuscript. Dana L. Radatz has no relevant financial interest or affiliations with any commercial

interests related to the subjects discussed within this article. Dana L. Radatz received grant funding from

Niagara University’s Research Council to support this work. We thank the Niagara Falls Police Department, the

Niagara County Sheriff’s Office, and the Niagara County Probation Department for permission to conduct this

research and assistance with accessing the data. We thank Jaclyn Danvir for her research assistance. Angela

Eke, Craig Rivera, and Maaike Helmus gave helpful feedback on an earlier version of this article. Correspondence

concerning this article should be addressed to Dr. Dana L. Radatz, Department of Criminology & Criminal

Justice, Niagara University, P.O. Box 1941, Lewiston, NY 14109; e-mail: dradatz@niagara.edu.

1035816CJBXXX10.1177/00938548211035816Criminal Justice and BehaviorRadatz, Hilton / ODARA Predicting Violence in a U.S. Sample

research-article2022

372 CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND BEHAVIOR

for more than one in four self-reported victims of violent offending (e.g., Burczycka &

Conroy, 2017) and over half of all completed adult court cases of violent offenses (Beaupré,

2015). IPV represents the largest single category of calls to police in both Canada and the

United States (e.g., Burczycka & Conroy, 2017; Klein, 2009). Criminal justice responses to

IPV have largely taken a rehabilitative focus including specialized domestic violence courts

and court-mandated IPV intervention programs as a condition of diversion or probation

(e.g., Barner & Carney, 2011; Tutty & Babins-Wagner, 2019). Despite this increased atten-

tion to IPV in the criminal justice and rehabilitation systems, IPV recidivism remains a

concern. For example, rearrest rates in the months after arrest for an IPV offense or treat-

ment completion have been reported in the range of 20% to 30% (e.g., Buzawa et al., 2012;

Hilton & Eke, 2017). Evaluations of arrest, prosecution, and treatment for IPV show incon-

sistent results, and there is evidence that their effects on IPV recidivism may differ depend-

ing on the characteristics of the persons being prosecuted (e.g., Maxwell & Garner, 2012)

or given treatment (e.g., Cantos et al., 2019), including assessed risk of violent recidivism

(e.g., Cox & Rivolta, 2019; Lila et al., 2019).

Specialized risk assessment tools have been developed to help police identify individuals

most at risk of committing another IPV offense (e.g., Hilton et al., 2004; Jung & Buro,

2017; Kropp et al., 2010; McEwan et al., 2018; Turner et al., 2019) assessing characteristics

such as substance use, previous IPV offenses, other criminal history, use of threats or weap-

ons, and other factors associated with recidivism. Policing services have widely adopted

these tools as a triage device to manage the front-line policing IPV caseload (e.g., Ennis

et al., 2015; Walton, 2019). The use of empirically validated risk assessment tools can help

prioritize handling of the most risky cases, to better manage risk and protect victims. This

article describes a validation study of one such tool.

THE VALIDITY OF IPV RISK ASSESSMENT TOOLS

Violence risk assessment tools are designed to identify an individual’s risk of recidivism.

Monahan and Skeem (2014) describe violence risk assessment approaches in terms of how

much they structure the evaluation of risk. Arranged in increasing structure, they range from

clinical judgment, to a standard list that identifies risk factors, to tools that identify and

guide the measurement of risk factors, to those that also provide a way to combine risk fac-

tors, and finally to those that produce a final risk estimate. Structured methods for assessing

the risk of IPV victimization first appeared in the late 1980s (Campbell, 1986), followed by

tools for assessing recidivism risk among individuals who perpetrate IPV (e.g., Kropp et al.,

1999). By the late 2010s, researchers identified 39 different tools that had been tested for

their ability to predict IPV or its recidivism (van der Put et al., 2019), including up to 15

tools or variants of tools designed and tested specifically for assessing risk of IPV reassault

or intimate partner homicide (Graham et al., 2021). The most structured tools use actuarial

methods, whereby the assessor scores risk factors typically derived from variables that pre-

dicted IPV outcomes in follow-up studies of individuals with a history of IPV and then

reports risk based on an actuarial data table (e.g., Hilton, 2021).

Such tools are typically validated in follow-up studies evaluating the risk assessment

tools before applying them to new populations. Discrimination is an aspect of predictive

validity that shows how well a tool predicts recidivism in a given sample. The ability to

accurately discriminate between recidivists and nonrecidivists is typically examined in