Decoding the Pathway to Violence: Behavioral Threat Assessment in Corporate Settings

Leakage occurs when a subject intentionally or unintentionally reveals clues to feelings, thoughts, or intentions that may signal an impending violent act. Research consistently identifies leakage as one of the most common warning behaviors across all categories of targeted violence.

Fixation is an increasingly pathological preoccupation with a person or a cause. In a corporate context, this manifests as an employee who cannot release a perceived slight, returning to it repeatedly while showing a deteriorating ability to engage with any other aspect of their professional life. Observed in combination with identification, novel aggression, or energy burst, these behaviors represent a pattern that demands immediate assessment.

Effective behavioral threat assessment requires a multidisciplinary team with the authority, expertise, and information access to evaluate a subject across multiple dimensions simultaneously. The FBI is explicit: the goal of a TAT is to assess dangerousness, not to predict violence.

A highly functioning corporate TAT brings together Corporate Security and Protective Intelligence, Human Resources, Legal Counsel, and Psychological Services. Sophisticated TATs rely on structured professional judgment tools such as the WAVR-21, a 21-item coded instrument designed specifically for assessing the risk of workplace and campus targeted violence. Assessment without management is incomplete: if a TAT determines that an individual is progressing along the pathway, the intervention strategy must be calibrated to the specific context.