ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses cross-national and cross-cultural aspects of violence risk assessment in more detail. It provides an overview of key issues based on the current state of the field in legal, clinical, and scientific domains. Violence risk assessment is important around the world. Professionals on every continent, with the exception of Antarctica, are involved in the application or evaluation of violence risk assessment. The chapter considers violence risk assessment to be forensic in nature because it is almost always used in the context of actual or potential legal decision-making. Given that there are fundamental rights to be protected, the first consideration of all practitioners engaging in violence risk assessment evaluations is to consider if their procedures violate any fundamental human rights. Violence risk assessments may inform a variety of legal decisions, but the extent to which risk assessment is included in various decisions is not universal.
