VioGén Algorithmic Risk Assessment
Spain's national system for scoring domestic and gender-violence risk, sorting cases into five bands that determine the police protection a victim receives, in use since 2007 and audited only by reverse engineering.
Built for Spain's Secretariat of State for Security (Interior Ministry)
VioGen assesses the risk faced by victims of gender and domestic violence in Spain, and the band it assigns determines what police protection they receive. It has run since 2007 under Organic Law 1/2004 on Comprehensive Protection Measures against Gender Violence, operated by the Secretariat of State for Security within the Interior Ministry. It was updated to VioGen 5.0 in 2019, with an AI pilot to refine the model from 2022.
It runs nationwide except in the Basque Country and Catalonia, which operate separately.
HOW IT WORKS
Officers complete two structured questionnaires: the Police Risk Assessment at first report, and the Police Risk Evolution Assessment to reassess over time. Together they cover 35 risk indicators. The output is a weighted score placing the case in one of five bands — unappreciated, low, medium, high or extreme — and that band determines the protection measures assigned.
A precision worth stating: the Eticas Foundation, which audited it, describes the underlying method as classical statistical weighting rather than machine learning. This site draws that distinction consistently, and it applies here.
WHAT THE AUDIT FOUND
No dedicated external regulator oversees VioGen. Eticas offered a confidential pro-bono audit from 2018 and received no response. It eventually conducted an external audit in 2021 by reverse engineering the system with the Ana Bella Foundation — that is, the only independent examination of a system determining the safety of tens of thousands of women was conducted without the operator's cooperation.
Its central finding: officers keep the system's automatic outcome in 95% of cases, despite the score being designed as a recommendation an officer may raise.
That figure matters more than any accuracy statistic. A system described as decision support, in which the human overrides the machine one time in twenty, is functionally an automated decision with a human present.
THE OUTCOMES
New York Times reporting found that at least 247 women were killed by partners after being assessed by VioGen since 2007, of whom at least 55 had been graded negligible or low risk.
As of 2025 the system carried roughly 92,000 active cases, 83% classified low or negligible risk.
THE CASE FOR IT
Risk assessment in domestic abuse is a genuinely difficult task that police must perform whether or not a tool exists, and unstructured judgement in this area has a poor record. A structured instrument applying the same 35 indicators to every case is more consistent than intuition and produces a record of the reasoning.
The purpose is also protective rather than punitive. Unlike most risk scoring in this catalogue, the output determines what support a victim receives, not what happens to a suspect.
Spain has maintained the system for nearly two decades and refined it, which is more sustained investment in this problem than most countries have made.
THE CASE AGAINST
The 95% concordance rate is the core problem. If the design assumption is that an officer exercises judgement over the score, and officers almost never do, the safeguard does not exist in practice.
The 55 deaths among women scored negligible or low risk are the consequence in its starkest form. No risk tool can be perfect, but the distribution of error matters when the error means no protection was assigned.
The refusal of external audit is a governance failure independent of the system's accuracy. A tool this consequential, operating for eighteen years, has been independently examined once, by reverse engineering, by an organisation the operator declined to work with.
And 83% of active cases classified low or negligible risk is a distribution worth interrogating rather than accepting, given what the fatality figures suggest about that band.
WHAT IS NOT ESTABLISHED
The current model's weightings and the effect of the 2022 AI pilot are not published.
Whether the 95% concordance figure has changed since 2021 is not established.
No published data was found on how many women assessed at high or extreme risk were subsequently harmed, which would be the counterpart to the low-risk fatality figure.
Whether the Basque and Catalan systems perform differently is not documented in the sources reviewed.
Where this is deployed
Full tracker →| Country | Force | Status |
|---|---|---|
| ES | Spanish police (multi-force)Spain, national | Operational |