The Ontario Domestic Assault Risk Assessment (ODARA) - Validity und authorised German translation of an intimate partner violence screening tool

Abstract

On average one third of all women are victimised by intimate partner violence at least once in their life. Many women are affected repeatedly. To efficiently reduce the risk of repeated violence a reliable and valid risk assessment is needed. To date several risk assessment tools have been published in the field of intimate partner violence. There is a strong demand for such tools to be applicable by a wider range of practitioners (e.g., police officers, hospital and victim services' staff) to reliably assess cases of intimate partner violence and recommend further interventions. By developing the Ontario Domestic Assault Risk Assessment (ODARA) it was the authors' aim to provide a brief risk assessment tool which can be scored on the basis of only few and easily collectable information and which efficiently discriminates between low-risk and high-risk offenders of intimate partner violence. Previous replication studies found moderate to good and on average higher power of discrimination of the ODARA compared to other risk assessment tools in the field. However, for the German speaking countries robust findings are still lacking. In the present publication a scientific and authorised translation of the ODARA is provided.