SRM – Module 4.1: Threat Assesment

4.1 Threat Assessment

As in any kind of ongoing process, you have to start someplace. The SRA process is iterative, which means that once you have taken the steps outlined in the process, you will need to start the cycle again since some of the steps you have taken have likely changed your security risk situation. To understand your new situation, you begin again. For this training course we will begin with the step of threat assessment as a starting point.

Threats are defined as potential dangers in your working environment. They are normally expressed as specific events such as robbery, kidnapping or harassment, for example.

It can be useful at this point to subdivide threats to your team into different types, in order to gain a more comprehensive overall picture, and to help organize your thinking about how to respond to or prepare for each type.

There are four basic types of threat to consider:

1 – Direct threats which specifically target you, your team, or office.

2 – Indirect threats which do not specifically target you, but can still harm you simply for being “in the wrong place at the wrong time” or “caught in the crossfire.”

3 – Criminality and banditry which typically targets your money or possessions, but which may result in other harm to you beyond the loss of your property.

4 – Miscellaneous threats include everything else, for example, illnesses, natural disasters, vehicle accidents and stress.

Threat assessment can be described as the assessment you make looking out at the field environment from inside your organization. The situation implied is that of an agency or organization that has entered an environment in which there are pre-existing threats.

The table shown below provides a variety of threats categorized by their type. It is only an example and does not mean that these particular threats are those that you may encounter in your country or work assignment. Each area’s threats will be different, but considering them and recording them in a similar way will give your organization the useful benefit of being able to compare threats in different offices or areas of operation in a meaningful way.