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With stabbings at a record high, and public outrage palpable following a spate of deaths, journalist Juliette Astrup asks if the public health approach to youth violence could be forgotten amid the headline-grabbing rhetoric of 'more boots on the streets'?
Knife crime has scarcely been out of the news this year, with the number of people fatally stabbed in the UK topping 100 by May - including three 17-year-olds in the first seven days of March. The headlines have horrified the nation, and public concern about crime in general has jumped to its highest level in years (YouGov, 2019).
Official figures tell the same story. Homicides in England and Wales are at a 10-year high. In 2018, there was a 6% increase in police-recorded offences involving a knife or sharp instrument, with the number of fatal stabbings the highest since Home Office records began in 1946 (ONS, 2019a; ONS, 2019b).
Northern Ireland too saw a small year-on-year increase in serious offences involving a knife or sharp instrument, and possession of weapon offences reached 1064 in 201819, a 20-year high (PSNI, 2019).
As reported in Community Practitioner this time last year (Harris, 2018), Scotland alone appears to be bucking the trend. Homicides north of the border more than halved, from 137 in 2004-5 (Violence Reduction Unit, 2019) to 59 in 2017-18, the joint lowest level for a 12-month period since 1976 (Scottish Government, 2018). This turnaround has followed a shift in approach to tackling violence: treating it like a disease - something that is preventable, rather than inevitable.
A VISIT TO THE MURDER CAPITAL
The pioneering Violence Reduction Unit (VRU) was set up in 2005, at a time when Glasgow had become known as Europe's murder capital. It introduced a radically new public health approach to violence: a multi-agency response that seeks to understand and address its complex root causes, as well as responding to incidents of violence and working towards long-term rehabilitation.
It proved so successful it was soon rolled out across the Scottish nation. The latest analysis finds serious assault and attempted murder cases fell by 35% in Scotland between 2008-09 and 2017-18 - largely due to fewer cases in the west, particularly in and around Glasgow. The study also found...