Rachel Snyder spotlights danger assessment
- Rachel Louise Snyder’s latest domestic-violence explainer spotlights the Danger Assessment, a 20-question lethality screen created by Johns Hopkins nurse-researcher Jacquelyn Campbell to gauge when intimate-partner abuse may turn fatal. - The tool pairs a one-year abuse calendar with weighted questions on guns, strangulation, forced sex, stalking, separation and suicide threats, then sorts cases into escalating danger levels for safety planning. - Campbell developed the assessment in 1986, and Johns Hopkins now trains police, hospitals and advocates to use it across response systems. (nursing.jhu.edu)
A domestic-violence case can look survivable until a small set of warning signs shows it is nearing homicide. The Danger Assessment was built to spot that shift. (thetrace.org) (nursing.jhu.edu) Jacquelyn Campbell, a Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing professor, created the Danger Assessment in 1986 after seeing abused women arrive at hospitals without any standard way to measure how close they were to being killed. (thetrace.org) (vawnet.org) The tool has two parts: a calendar marking violent incidents over the past year and a 20-item questionnaire about specific risk factors. It is designed to estimate lethality risk in intimate partner violence, not just the chance of another assault. (thetrace.org) (vawnet.org) Several questions track markers that research ties to homicide: whether the abuser owns a gun, has used or threatened a lethal weapon, has threatened to kill, or has avoided arrest for domestic violence. Other items ask whether violence has escalated, whether the victim recently left, and whether forced sex occurred. (sabi.unc.edu) The assessment also asks about suicidal thoughts or behavior by the abuser. Campbell told The Trace that in her team’s study, the male partner killed himself in about one-third of the intimate-partner homicide cases they reviewed. (thetrace.org) That link has drawn fresh attention after two April 2026 murder-suicides: former Virginia lieutenant governor Justin Fairfax fatally shot his wife, Cerina Fairfax, in Annandale, Virginia, and a Louisiana shooting killed eight children, seven of them the gunman’s own, while injuring two adults, including his wife. (thetrace.org) The Danger Assessment is not a prediction that any one person will be killed. Campbell’s own instrument says it cannot tell a victim what will happen in her case; it identifies how many known homicide risk factors are present. (sabi.unc.edu) That distinction matters because many domestic-violence tools measure re-assault, recidivism or general danger after intervention. The Danger Assessment was built specifically around homicide risk, which is why advocates treat it as a lethality screen rather than a broad behavior checklist. (vawnet.org) (nij.ojp.gov) Johns Hopkins’ Danger Assessment Training and Technical Assistance Center now trains law enforcement, health care professionals and domestic-violence advocates to use the instrument and build a shared language around high-risk cases. The center says 3 million to 4 million women in the United States are abused each year and 1,500 to 1,600 are killed by abusers. (nursing.jhu.edu) The point of the questionnaire is not paperwork. It is to change what happens next: faster safety planning, sharper documentation, and quicker escalation when a case contains the same signals that have appeared again and again before intimate-partner homicide. (nursing.jhu.edu) (thetrace.org)
