Turning Legal Obligations into Safety: Norway’s Police Risk Assessment System for IPV Under Article 51 IC

The Istanbul Convention requires the police to have a robust system for effectively and systematically preventing repeat incidents of intimate partner violence (IPV) and for protecting the victim. Performing risk assessments is crucial to this end. Despite having had the risk assessment tool SARA:SV at their disposal since 2013, Norwegian police have not handled IPV cases as they are obliged to by the Convention. From 2022 onward the risk assessment should have been performed by a preventive risk analyst, but as this expertise is a scarce resource, the police system lacks robustness. Robustness may be achieved by using the capacity of frontline police officers. In that case, other risk assessment tools that are easier to score than SARA:SV should be made available, e.g., actuarial tools such as the Canadian ODARA or the Spanish VioGén system.