Although work with protective factors is relatively recent, it is sufficiently well developed to contribute to several areas of practice. Here, we consider treatment need assessment, treatment planning during therapy, case management, and risk assessment. We draw particularly on ideas from de Vogel et al. [30] and from Kelley et al. [25].

Treatment need assessment refers to the kind of assessment that might occur either as part of an aid to sentencing evaluation or as an initial part of a complex treatment intervention. In either case, its purpose is typically to identify relevant treatment needs which if addressed might lead to reduced risk. This kind of assessment typically would also speak to other issues such as the appropriate intensity of treatment or particular responsivity issues that should be taken into account. Importantly, the product produced by a treatment needs assessment is typically a communication to other professionals designed to contribute to their decisions regarding the individual being assessed.

Structured assessment of protective factors can contribute to a treatment need assessment in two primary ways. First, it allows the identification of protective factors that are present to a significant degree and which it will be important to sustain. This may alert the professional receiving the assessment of the potential to do harm by inadvertently disrupting existing protective factors. Second, it affords identification of insufficiently developed protective factors that should be a focus of clinical services. De Vogel et al. [10, 29] refer to this as the identification of Keys and Goals.

This refers to the ongoing negotiation of what the individual chooses to work on with a clinician with whom they have, or are developing, a therapeutic alliance. Strengths-based treatment planning will normally involve discussing what the person’s priorities and values are, along with what they were striving for when they committed offenses, followed by a collaborative identification of ways they can make their lives more satisfying while avoiding offending, and strengths they could use or develop to assist in this. Using the language of the Good Lives Model, the first part of this involves identification of valued primary goods that were implicated in their offending while the second part involves creating prosocial Good Lives goals and determining what strengths can contribute to achieving these goals. These can be pre-existing strengths that are newly purposed for this task or strengths that need developing. Additionally, one kind of strength can be used to develop a different kind of protective factor. For example, strengths that are part of the broad Resilience factor can be used to develop a lifestyle that reduces exposure to events that trigger dynamic risk factors or circumstances that provide opportunities to offend. Resilience can also make it easier to cope with the frustrations that sticking to such a lifestyle entails. Thus, Resilience can be applied to help someone develop an aspect of Sexual Self-Regulation.

Structured assessment of protective factors can contribute to this kind of Treatment Planning by providing a check on whether the focus of treatment that has been collaboratively evolved actually includes the main protective factors that need to be sustained and developed. If they are included, then there are reasonable grounds for supposing that risk will be reduced. If not, then the clinical process risks departing from the RNR Need principle and not conforming to the dual aims of GLM derived interventions: risk reduction and the enhancement of wellbeing.

Figure 1 illustrates the process described.

Therapy planning using the Good Lives Model and SAPROF-SO

Where the treatment planning approach is less strengths based and simply focused on risk reduction, treatment goals may be framed in terms of controlling or suppressing risk factors. There is a place for this, but it can also be demotivating and potentially can set up various clinically unhelpful dynamics. One possibility is the development of an adversarial cycle in which the individual seeks to deny or conceal expressions of risk while the clinician seeks to identify risk factors by giving meaning to subtle aspects of the individual’s behavior. Another possibility is that the individual owns the risk factors that apply to them to such an extent that they become part of their identity. While the second possibility would make it easier for a therapeutic alliance to be developed, it is important to recall that modern understandings of the desistance process give a central place to the development of a prosocial identity, a view of the self that is not inherently deviant/criminal [31,32,33,34]. Framing what should be done to reduce risk as the development of protective factors can avoid some of these difficulties. Orienting to the development of protective factors as a way of reducing risk allows treatment goals to be formulated in a way that is more engaging and less stigmatizing. A focus on dynamic protective factors also gives the individual a greater sense of the future being in their control. A different kind of life becomes something they can choose.

By case management we mean a, typically multi-disciplinary, process in which decisions are made about things like the need for further treatment in the current setting, what kind of future setting would be most helpful, or whether services are no longer required. Case management might also speak to the form that service should take within a given setting. Structured assessment of protective factors can contribute to case management in a number of ways. Most straightforwardly it allows identification of how far protective factors have been developed in the current setting and affords discussion of which setting will make it easier to develop them further. A particular contribution is the theory of changing protections [30] which was also elaborated on in the context of the SAPROF-SO by Kelley et al. [25]. This asserts that potential protective factors can be divided into dynamically increasing factors and dynamically decreasing protective factors. The latter are professionally provided factors such as legal controls (supervision or a secure setting), a supervised lifestyle, or the provision of various kinds of treatment services, while the former are protective aspects of the individual or features of how they engage with their social environment that can continue after professional services are no longer being provided. Case management can then be understood as applying dynamically decreasing factors to the extent required to stabilize the individual but seeking to build up the dynamic increasing factors so that they can become the primary source of protection and so dynamic decreasing factors can be reduced in response.

Another role for the structured assessment of protective factors is for those individuals for whom professional services may be required indefinitely for them to live safely. Examples would be individuals with a traumatic brain injury whose compromised self-regulation easily leads to sexual or violent behavior or someone with major mental illness who becomes dangerous when their symptoms are more acute, and they decompensate. In the latter case, for instance, a mental health team may develop individualized behavior management plans that allow such individuals to be safely de-escalated and indicate how staff should interact with them to optimize their functioning. Kelley et al. [25] described how a structured assessment of protective factors should include determination of what processes within the current setting are required to sustain the individual’s current level of protective factors. This in turn can then be used to analyze a potential future environment to determine whether it can support this functioning.

When the underlying research is better developed, it will be possible to make an actuarial adjustment of risk estimates derived from static actuarial instruments. At this time, we know that some adjustment of risk estimates based on the degree of protective factors is warranted but it is not clear how large this should be. In this state of partial knowledge the following strategy seems reasonable. Use a static actuarial risk estimate to characterize the pre-treatment level of risk, perhaps using the standardized risk levels [35]. Characterize the individuals’ long-term vulnerabilities. Factor analysis of instruments like the STABLE-2007 indicates that these cluster into two groups of related criminogenic needs, those involving antisocial traits and those involving offense-related sexual deviance [36]. It is then possible to use the SAPROF-SO to ask whether protective factors relevant to the person’s main long-term vulnerabilities have been developed. In doing this the Resilience group of protective factors should be considered relevant to antisocial traits while the Adaptive Sexuality group of protective factors is relevant to the sexual deviancy related long-term vulnerabilities. While we cannot yet precisely quantify the degree to which protective factors reduce sexual recidivism, we can be confident that they are associated with lower recidivism, so it is reasonable to use this kind of analysis to report whether someone has, for example, made risk relevant progress in treatment. If they have not made risk relevant progress in treatment, then their risk is likely well described by their score on the static actuarial instrument. If they have made this kind of progress, then their risk is likely materially lower.