Assessing Risk of Recidivism in Sex Offenders

Violent behaviour risk assessment is currently one of the most relevant research areas in the Psychology of Crime. Various scales for violence risk assessment have been developed in recent years through research on criminal careers and risk factors. One such instrument is the Sexual Violence Risk Assessment-20 (SVR-20), translated and adapted to Spanish by the Advanced Studies in Violence Group at the University of Barcelona. The goal of this study is to assess the capacity of the SVR-20 for predicting sexual violence recidivism in a Spanish sample of sex offender prison inmates. The method used was a retrospective study based on the files of 163 sex offenders who had been discharged from prison. Data were analyzed using the logistic regression technique. Of the total sample, 79.9% of non-recidivists and 70.8 % of recidivists were correctly classified. The ROC curve obtained for the model shows very good discriminant capacity for the SVR-20, with an AUC value of 0.83. The main conclusion of this study is that the Spanish adaptation of the SVR-20 is a useful instrument for improving the prediction of sexual violence risk.