Department of Mental Health Law and Policy, University of South Florida, 13301 Bruce B. Downs Blvd., Tampa, FL 33612, USA.
Behav Sci Law. 2013 Jan-Feb;31(1):1-7. doi: 10.1002/bsl.2054.
Mental health professionals are routinely called upon to assess and testify concerning the violence risk of their patients. Expert opinion on risk assessment continues to influence decisions resulting in the long-term denial of civil liberty or even death in the case of capital proceedings. Today, many clinicians use structured risk assessment tools to assist in these tasks. Although few would claim that violence can be predicted without error, all but the most skeptical would concede that our knowledge and ability to assess violence risk far exceeds that of three decades ago. This said, whether current practices are empirically, ethically, or legally valid remains a question of great importance given the consequences that may follow erroneous assessments. And while 30 years ago there was a broad (albeit often overstated) consensus that expert opinion on this topic was inherently suspect, today the field appears to operate on a broad (albeit often overstated) consensus that practices have improved to a sufficient extent to warrant the sizeable impact that violence risk assessments often have on individual liberty, levels of service, and resource allocation.
心理健康专业人员经常被要求评估和证明其患者的暴力风险。关于风险评估的专家意见继续影响导致长期剥夺公民自由甚至死刑的决策，在死刑案件中更是如此。如今，许多临床医生使用结构化风险评估工具来协助完成这些任务。虽然很少有人声称可以毫无错误地预测暴力行为，但除了最怀疑论者之外，所有人都会承认，我们评估暴力风险的知识和能力远远超过了三十年前。话虽如此，鉴于错误评估可能带来的后果，目前的实践在经验、伦理或法律上是否有效仍然是一个非常重要的问题。尽管三十年前人们普遍（尽管常常被夸大）认为，关于这个话题的专家意见本质上是可疑的，但如今该领域似乎存在着广泛的共识（尽管常常被夸大），即实践已经得到了足够的改进，足以证明暴力风险评估对个人自由、服务水平和资源分配的重大影响是合理的。
