A Joined-Up Approach to Sustainable Violence Prevention?

With ‘knife crime’ returning to the headlines from 2015 onwards the limitations of existing enforcement-led interventions of recent years became profoundly exposed. More than this, the impact of proactive policing upon youth and communities, especially BAME communities, with periodic roll-outs of stop and search policy, appeared to further alienate many, diminishing trust and confidence, and convincing many young people that knife carrying could offer a degree of protection. In response, especially following the much heralded success of the Strathclyde Community Initiative to Reduce Violence (CIRV) and Boston’s successful gang strategy ‘Operation Ceasefire’ in the USA, a range of international commentators have begun urging the adoption of more ‘joined up’ ‘public health’ approaches to violence. Such strategies have combined with recent WHO advocacy favouring public health, ecological or evidence-led and ‘epidemiological’, models of violence prevention, seeking to rebalance the strategies aimed at addressing knife-involved violence. But a public health violence strategy involves much more than just giving doctors and clinicians the lead, and in the chapter we raise some of the issues. Nevertheless the optimism and popularity of ‘public health’ in violence reduction has entailed a significant shift in knife crime discourse, although it has not been plain sailing—despite much talk, there is little apparent agreement on what a sustainable violence reduction strategy might actually look like as well as questions about the willingness of government—especially in austerity—to adequately fund it. The issue of mandatory A&E reporting of weapon assault injuries to the police has also divided opinion.