Trauma, Adversity and Violent Extremism: Implications for Risk Assessment

Overview

This report outlines the foundations for a trauma-informed approach to risk assessment and discusses the utility of adopting such an approach in the contexts of countering violent extremism (CVE) and counterterrorism (CT). It builds on a systematic review on trauma, adversity, and violent extremism that examined the prevalence of trauma in life histories of violent extremists, and the relevance of trauma for interpreting journeys into and out of extremism (Lewis et al., 2024a).

The systematic review emphasised that relationships between trauma and radicalisation are important but non-deterministic. It outlined how a nuanced understanding of trauma and its effects can help researchers and practitioners interpret how and why some individuals become, and remain engaged in, violent extremism. This perspective helps to illustrate how individualised and contextualised (mal)adaptive responses to trauma might contribute to a range of negative life outcomes including, but not limited to, violent extremism (Lewis et al., 2024a). This report explores how understanding these processes might inform risk assessment.  

In what follows we set out some of the underpinning elements of a trauma-informed approach to risk assessment. The report first explores the key features of the dominant structured professional judgement (SPJ) risk assessment paradigm used in this context. Through this discussion, we examine whether and how trauma and its effects are currently captured within existing SPJ tools. Attention then moves to the core features of a more explicitly trauma-informed approach and discusses how it might help practitioners assess and interpret risk and address some of the challenges facing current SPJ approaches. This involves setting out four features of a trauma-informed approach to risk assessment, which include:

• The gains made by understanding involvement in violent extremism as a means of adapting to experiences of trauma and adversity in an effort to meet basic psychosocial needs.
• The need for a social-ecological, contextualised interpretation of risk that recognise how trauma can become embedded in contexts which are themselves dynamic and can influence levels of risk.
• The benefits of taking a life-course perspective which can make visible how the impact of trauma histories unfolds over time.
• The importance of a more holistic and dynamic understanding of how histories of trauma and adversity shape risk.