SAPROF: Guidelines for the Assessment of Protective Factors for Violence Risk

The SAPROF (Structured Assessment of Protective Factors for Violence Risk) is a violence risk assessment tool specifically developed for the assessment of protective factors for adult offenders. The tool was intended to be used in addition to risk focused Structured Professional Judgment assessment tools, such as the HCR-20 or the HCR-20V3, but can also be used together with actuarial tools. Following the SPJ approach, the SAPROF concludes with an overall judgment of the level of available protection in the assessed context. The SAPROF assessment is suitable for people with violent offending histories as well as for people who have previously sexually offended.

The tool was developed in the Van der Hoeven Kliniek (a forensic psychiatric hospital in The Netherlands) in cooperation with the Pompe Kliniek and the University of Maastricht.
The SAPROF contains 17 protective factors organized into three scales. 15 of the factors are dynamic, making the factors valuable treatment targets and treatment evaluation measures. After coding the 17 items on a three-point scale (0-2) or seven-point scale (adding +/- for clinical utility and more dynamic measurement of change), the assessor is asked to point out those items which are the most important protective factors for the assessed individual in his or her specific situation: Key-items (those items deemed the strongest protectors against violence risk in the assessed context) and Goal-items (those items deemed the most important targets for current treatment).