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Women’S Risk Factors And Their Contributions To Existing Risk/Needs Assessment: The Current Status Of A Gender-Responsive Supplement, Patricia Van Voorhis, Emily M. Wright, Emily J. Salisbury, Ashley Bauman

Criminology and Criminal Justice Faculty Publications

A growing body of scholarship faults existing risk/needs assessment models for neglecting the risk factors most relevant to women offenders. In response, a series of gender-responsive assessment models were tested for their contributions to widely used gender-neutral risk needs assessments. In six of eight samples studied, subsets of the gender-responsive scales achieved statistically significant contributions to gender-neutral models. Promising results were found for the following: (a) parental stress, family support, self-efficacy, educational assets, housing safety, anger/hostility, and current mental health factors in probation samples; (b) child abuse, anger/hostility, relationship dysfunction, family support, and current mental health factors among prisoners; and …