When a Lifesaving Tool Isn’t Utilized
A Reader’s Illuminating Challenge to the Efficacy of the LAP
Recently, a reader nudged me regarding a conversation on a prior post— “Lethality Assessment Protocol: Early identification + immediate connection to services = fewer deaths.”
She’s Right: Research Backs the Concern
The reader, Kc, posted an excellent comment / response to the piece. Here it is:
This article raises an important topic, but it's critical we go deeper into the real-world failures of the Lethality Assessment Protocol (LAP). While the LAP was developed with the good intention of identifying victims at high risk of being killed by an intimate partner, research and lived experiences show that it often fails the very women it's supposed to protect.
In many jurisdictions, law enforcement doesn’t consistently use LAP, or uses it incorrectly. Officers often skip questions, don’t explain their purpose, or avoid administering it altogether due to time constraints or lack of training. According to a study published in Feminist Criminology, even when women score as “high danger,” they are not always offered meaningful help or immediate safety options. Worse, the LAP can become a checklist formality, not a lifesaving tool.
And here’s the deeper issue: when police or DSS fail to act on the results, or don’t follow up with real protection or access to shelter and services, victims are left exposed—sometimes retraumatized by a system that pretends to help but actually just collects data. That can even be used against mothers in family court, where father-access frameworks are prioritized over safety.
According to a NIJ-funded study, the LAP did not significantly improve outcomes in terms of victim safety planning or protection orders. In fact, many high-risk women did not engage with services after the LAP, often because there were no services available or they feared the consequences of police involvement (especially in custody situations).
To date, LAP programs have been funded through federal grants like the Office on Violence Against Women and some state STOP VAWA funds, but this funding does not guarantee effectiveness—especially when implementation is left to undertrained or overburdened officers.
We need real reform that prioritizes accountability for abusers, not just risk assessments for victims. LAP is not enough when the system itself still centers abuser rights over victim safety—especially for mothers navigating both violence and custody courts.
In summary, Kc has proposed that there are the following shortcomings with the LAP:
Law enforcement doesn’t consistently use LAP; or if they are using it consistently, the protocol is not always applied correctly. Then, even if LE administer the LAP correctly, the woman in danger is not always offered meaningful help or immediate safety options.
While I wasn’t able to locate the specific study in the Feminist Criminology journal (perhaps I need different search terms), the shortcomings that Kc identified have been covered by other studies, too. For example, in Criminology & Criminal Justice, there was a study in 2024 on the challenges and barriers to implementing the LAP. To note, a shortcoming of the study is that it has a small sample pool, with 24 respondents. However, these might be characterized as “high value” or “deep knowledge” respondents as they were advocates at domestic violence agencies. Therefore, we might reasonably imagine that they have extended exposure to DV victim-survivors, and exposure to multiple cases and scenarios, which could allow them the insight to develop observations of patterns.
The abstract comments that: Results showed advocates generally support the protocol and believe it has beneficial intent and purpose. Challenges identified included :
lack of victim cooperation,
variations in law enforcement officer attitude,
and deficiencies in training.
Lethality assessment protocol is a useful tool, yet all stakeholders must:
actively engage in cooperative training,
tackle personal biases toward domestic violence victims,
and gain a better understanding of victim psychology.
I’ve added this bulleted formatting for conceptual organization. And I have some qualms with the diction of ‘lack of victim cooperation’ which I believe belies a problem they already identified— a fundamental misunderstanding of victim psychology. It is rather unfortunate that coercive control is hard to understand unless one has experienced it. Or is that willful ignorance? What can we do to better educate people who have not shared in this bewildering chapter?
Still—There’s Hope in the History
I also appreciated the opening paragraph of the article, which packs in helpful contextualization and orientation:
Intimate partner violence (IPV) gained public recognition as an expanding societal problem in the 1970s in the United States (Campbell, 1981). Since then, numerous social services have been developed for victims of IPV. Utilization of these available support services has been identified as a key factor in successfully ending an abusive relationship (Bennet Cattaneo et al., 2007). Although various types of assistance are now available to victims in such destructive relationships, evidence suggests these resources may be either unknown to individuals or inaccessible (Garrity, 2015).
I read this and felt somewhat encouraged, strangely. If IPV has only been gaining recognition since the 1970’s, we are still relatively early in finding ways to ameliorate it. IPV is upheld through our culture, so encompassing we cannot perceive it, like a fish is blind to water, a bird ignorant of air. It is generational, we learn to accept and bide violence and porous boundaries as little girls. The abuser/ controller creeps, soft footed, into the target’s life and so many of us are caught unawares once the paradigm shift lands.
Dr. Campbell, the originator of the LAP, researched it in the 80’s and 90’s and presumably it began to be implemented thereafter, in the late 1990’s? So now it is out there in the field, and researchers (and readers!) are focusing attention on its shortcomings. We still have much road to cover in making progress, and if our forebears only began to flag and critique IPV in the 70’s, we are yet early in the game.
I’m also encouraged by this author’s assessment that once we’d identified a problem, advocated began to develop interventions and support services. One intervention is the Lethality Assessment Protocol, which we could say falls into the category of still being not entirely accessible. And that is something we can analyze and improve.
Based on my understanding of it, the LAP is based on regression analysis, and I have a fundamental confidence in this statistical modeling. “Regression analysis is a reliable method of identifying which variables have impact on a topic of interest. The process of performing a regression allows you to confidently determine which factors matter most, which factors can be ignored, and how these factors influence each other.”
In this context, I trust regression’s logic: it helps us distinguish signal from noise. And yet—statistics only matter if the people using them take the results seriously.
Dr. Campbell reviewed the cases of femicide, and could trace linkages between them, similar occurrences or factors that lined up. Such as the man’s possession of a firearm, or that the man had strangled the woman. Strangulation is oftentimes the penultimate act before murder.
Goodness, speaking of cultural conditioning— one of my favorite movies growing up was “Death Becomes Her” with Bruce Willis, Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep. Watched it countless times. Anyone remember how the Bruce Willis character strangles the Streep character at the top of the stairs? And we feel that Streep has been so mean, so demeaning of the fuddy-dud doctor that she kinda deserves it.
Strangulation: The Penultimate Act
From a CBS article: Amanda McCormick, an associate criminology professor at the University of the Fraser Valley, says strangulation is a key warning sign that someone is at a much higher risk of being killed by their intimate partner. "It's one of the best predictors of homicide or femicide,” said McCormick. She also referenced a 2008 National Library of Medicine study showing that someone in an abusive partnership is more than seven times more likely to be killed by their partner if they've been strangled by that partner in the past.
On the LAP, the question about strangulation is #10 out of twenty total. Perhaps it should be moved farther up the list, if it is one of the most salient factors?
Reading about recent femicides, of which, grotesquely, there are three per day, I came across the story of Marie Varsos who was shot and killed, along with her mother, by her abuser.
Marie’s brother Alex had this to say: "There were systemic failures in law enforcement's response to Shaun's escalating behavior, leaving him unchecked and emboldened to harm my sister and our family. A month prior to my sister's death, Shaun had [choked] Marie until she was unconscious. I believe that local law enforcement didn't evaluate his level of risk appropriately, and I can imagine the lethality screen of an offender is a commonality among other cases," Youn said. [Newsweek article]
If the police had properly administered the LAP to Marie Varsos (on the right in the photo, with her Mom), and had the proper response, perhaps she’d still be alive.
The LAP was created with the best of intentions. Now we need to ensure it’s applied with the urgency, intelligence, and follow-through that victims deserve.
If you’ve taken the LAP, or seen it misused, I’d love to hear from you.
Next week, we’ll explore ways that the LAP tool could be better utilized.