Five steps to assessing a threat

1. Establish the facts surrounding the threat(s). It’s important to know exactly what has happened. This can be done through interviews or by asking questions to key people, and occasionally through relevant reports.

2. Establish whether there is a pattern of threats over time. If several threats are made in a row (as often happens) it is important to look for patterns, such as the means used to threaten, the times when threats appear, symbols, information passed on in writing or verbally, etc. It is not always possible to establish such patterns, but they are important for making a proper threat assessment.

3. Establish the objective of the threat. As a threat usually has a clear objective linked to the impact of your work, following the thread of this impact may help you establish what the threat is intended to achieve.

4. Establish who is making the threat. (This can only be done by going through the first three steps first.) Try to be as specific as possible. For example, you could say that “the government” is threatening you. But since any government is a complex actor, it is more useful to find out which part of the government may be behind the threats. Actors such as “security forces” and “guerrilla groups” are also complex actors. Remember that even a signed threat could be false. This can be a useful way for the person making the threats to avoid political costs and still achieve the aim of provoking fear in a defender and trying to prevent him or her from working.

5. Make a reasonable conclusion about whether or not the threat can be put into action. Violence is conditional. You can never be completely sure that a threat will – or will never - be carried out. Making predictions about violence is about stating that, given certain circumstances, a specific risk exists that a particular person or group will act violently against a particular target.

Defenders are not fortune tellers and cannot pretend to know what is going to happen. However, you can come to a reasonable conclusion about whether or not a given threat is likely to be put into action. You may not have gained enough information about the threat through the previous four steps and may therefore not reach a conclusion. You may also have different opinions about how “real” the threat is. In any case, you have to proceed on the basis of the worst case scenario.

For example:

Death threats have been made against a human rights worker. The group analyses the threats and reach two opposing conclusions, both based on good reasoning. Some say the threat is a total fake, while others people see worrying signals about its feasibility. At the end of the meeting, the group decides to assume the worst case scenario, i.e. that the threat is feasible, and take security measures accordingly.

This threat assessment progresses from solid facts (step 1) to increasingly speculative reasoning. Step 2 involves some interpretation of the facts, and this increases further through steps 3 to 5. There are good reasons for following the order of the steps. Going directly to step 2 or 4, for example, will miss out the more solid information arising from the previous steps.