The Asia Pacific Association of Threat Assessment Professionals (APATAP) Committee is excited to announce that our annual conference will be held at Disneyland, Hong Kong from 25 - 27 February 2019.
Our conference theme this year is “Online threats, offline lives: Reality and Practice of Online Threat Management”. This is a highly relevant theme to today’s society and reflects current advancements in the use of technology and social media in assessing and managing global, local, and individual-level threats.
We invite all mental health, law enforcement, security, workplace health and safety, and other professionals tasked with the prevention and response of behavioural risks to join us in this learning and networking opportunity.
Over the last few years, a number of studies analysing characteristics and behaviours of a range of grievance-fueled violent actors have emerged. These include school shooters, mass murderers, lone actor terrorists, attackers of politicians, and public figures. Whilst providing insight into the behavioural trajectory to such violence, their operational utility may be constrained: Only those actors that successfully committed or attempted to commit such acts of violence are sampled. Others who did not do so, whilst exhibiting similar vulnerabilities, risk factors, and concerning behaviours, are typically omitted, largely because of a reliance upon open-source data.
This research uses three data sets; focusing on lone actor terrorists, mass murderers, and fixated individuals. These data sets are compared to identify similarities and differences between indicators for grievance fuelled violence. The data set of fixated individuals, built from pre-violence indicators taken from London's Fixated Threat Assessment Centre, acts as a control group for pre-violent behavioural indicators. The results of the analysis help further current understanding of movements towards grievance fuelled violence, and offer alternative prevention initiatives in this space.
Dr Emily Corner is a Lecturer of Criminology at the Centre for Social Research and Methods at the Australian National University. Prior to joining ANU, Emily was a Research Associate at the department of Security and Crime Science at University College London, working on projects... Read More →
