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Good practice Imported

VioGén — Spain's gender-violence police risk assessment

Spain · Madrid · See the Spain profile · See the Madrid profile

Evidence: Observational / pre–post Top 35% 67/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

VioGén scores the risk faced by gender-violence victims to set police protection — ~400,000 assessments a year, 6M+ in total. Powerful at scale, but documented misclassifications (low risk before some homicides) make it a cautionary case.

2007
Programme running since
~400,000
Assessments per year
>6 million
Total assessments to date
~79%
VPR4.0 sensitivity
~35%
VPR4.0 specificity
55 of 247
Women killed after low/negligible-risk assessment (since 2007)
VioGén — Spain's gender-violence police risk assessment

Details

Maturity
Established
Promoter
Spanish Ministry of the Interior
Keywords
Compliance & enforcement, decision support, gender-based violence, policing, risk assessment

Context

VioGén, run by Spain's Ministry of the Interior since 2007, assigns a risk level to women who report gender-based violence, shaping the police protection they receive; it is used almost nationwide, with around 400,000 assessments a year and more than six million in total.

Objectives

Assess the risk of future violence to calibrate the level of police protection provided to victims.

Activities

Application of the VPR4.0 risk-assessment protocol to reported cases of gender-based violence.

Results

Evaluations of the VPR4.0 protocol report ~79% sensitivity but only ~35% specificity; since 2007, at least 55 of 247 women later killed had been assessed by the system as facing negligible or low risk.

Conclusions

Described as a high-stakes, mixed case — institutionalised and scaled nationally, but with real transparency and accountability gaps given the life-or-death consequences of algorithmic risk scores.

Implementation

Implementation detail (cost, timeline, staffing, conditions for success) is not yet available for this practice.

Commonly funded by

National / regional programmes CERV — Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values

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Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

Attachments

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