Family Threat Assessments should be used whenever there is an allegation of domestic violence, child abuse or child molestation. These allegations are serious and consequences can impact the parties for a lifetime. This assessment should be used whenever there is a need to prove or disprove an allegation before addressing the "best interest of the child(ren)".

Other situations where the Family Threat Assessment would be appropriate is where there is a dispute in child custody and a traditional child custody evaluation (EC 730) fails to address all the issues. Oftentimes, evaluations fail to investigate in an uncontrolled environment, where many of the answers are found.