Research
You will find a complete range of our peer-reviewed monographs, multi-authored and edited works, including original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
Having now explored the efforts of Violence Reduction Units (VRUs) to enhance multi-agency working and reach out to their local communities, this chapter considers two additional VRU functions. First, we explore VRUs’ role in commissioning interventions to prevent and reduce violence. Despite many VRU directors expressing a desire to ‘get upstream’ of the problem of violence – in other words, to focus their attention on prevention and root causes – in practice, they often found themselves slipping downstream into a more reactive mode of working, as a range of factors, including political pressure and the influence of evaluations, drew them away from upstream work.
In the second part of the chapter, we turn our attention to VRUs’ role in shaping national and institutional priorities, policies, and practices, which have the potential to prevent violence in England and Wales. VRUs have encountered significant challenges in making progress in this area. To set the foundations for our concluding chapter, we explore these challenges and consider why VRUs have struggled to replicate the success of their counterpart north of the border.
Part II of this book traces the development of the 20 Violence Reduction Units (VRUs) in England and Wales, from their establishment up until September 2023 when the authors of this book organised and hosted a face-to-face, all-day workshop with VRU directors and members of their teams. Its purpose is to provide readers with a detailed insight into the work of the VRUs, including their priorities, ways of working, and key challenges and opportunities. This chapter begins by examining the early weeks and months of the VRUs, considering the initial structure and make-up of these units, as well as some of the early pressures they faced. It proceeds to explore one of their core functions: enhancing multi-agency working in their respective regions. As part of this exploration, we consider the initial impact and longer-term implications of the statutory ‘Serious Violence Duty’, which came into effect in January 2023. Finally, we examine the work that VRUs have done to reach out to, and engage with, communities and young people in their areas as part of their efforts to prevent violence.
The fundamental argument we make in this book is that we can move towards less violent societies by advancing a public health approach to violence prevention. Our main aim is provide a novel and comprehensive conceptual framework for the public health approach, and to show why it offers a transformative path towards a low-violence society. In this introductory chapter, we set the scene by examining the nature and scale of interpersonal violence in England and Wales. We look closely at London, as it is commonly the source of public and political concern around violent crime. Next, we review what current research suggests about the causes of violent crime, before introducing the central topic of this book: the public health approach to violence prevention. This section provides an initial insight into the development of the public health approach, which we pick up in much greater detail in Part I. We then outline the research on which this book is based: a three-year project involving a collaboration of academics across four universities in England and Scotland, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. Lastly, we discuss the book’s overall structure and style.
Available open access digitally under CC BY NC ND licence.
Preventing Violence argues that we can move towards safer and better societies by advancing holistic public health approaches to violence prevention.
It explores the serious limitations of contemporary public health approaches and proposes an alternative path forward. Based on data from a three-year, ESRC-funded project, Public Health, Youth and Violence Reduction, it also examines in-depth the work of 20 Violence Reduction Units in England and Wales.
The book makes clear recommendations for policy makers, practitioners and researchers working to prevent violence and improve the lives of children and young people.
The period between 2018 and 2023 saw a flurry of policy developments, which represented the putative implementation of a public health approach to violence prevention in England and Wales. Chapter 2 presents a granular contemporary history that focuses on these crucial six years. We divide the chapter into four sections:
In the first section, we describe how calls for the public health approach gained momentum and influence over the course of 2018, with a consensus forming by the end of the year.
In the second section, we look at how the public health approach was institutionalised between 2019 and 2023, through three key levers: the creation of regional Violence Reduction Units, as vessels for the delivery of the public health approach; the establishment of the Youth Endowment Fund as a ‘what works’ centre for youth violence interventions; and the enactment of the Serious Violence Duty, a statutory instrument that compelled local agencies to work together to better understand and address violence.
In the third section, we explore what the public health approach came to mean during this period, and the contention that arose about how it was being implemented.
Finally, in the fourth section, we conclude the chapter.
The public health approach to violence prevention was formally adopted first as regional policy in London in 2018, and then as national policy in England and Wales in 2019. This chapter examines the historical background to these decisions, exploring how the public health approach emerged and developed in policy and practice, first in Scotland and later in England and Wales. To set the longer-term historical context, we consider the history of youth justice in Scotland from the early post-war period. Some of the philosophical principles associated with Scotland’s contemporary public health approach to violence prevention are clearly present in this historical account. Next, we discuss the establishment of the Scottish Violence Reduction Unit, and the influence of the World Health Organization and United States (US)-based public health initiatives on subsequent developments in Scotland. The final section of the chapter turns to England and Wales and its long-term trajectory of youth justice. This section takes us up to 2018 and the point at which the public health approach to violence prevention was formally adopted in London. This chapter begins by looking at the some of the earliest roots of public health approaches, which emerged in the US in the 1980s.
In this final chapter, we switch to a forward-looking lens and focus on the question: ‘Where should we go from here?’ While we contend that Violence Reduction Units (VRUs) can play an important role in advancing a public health approach to violence prevention in the years ahead, there are things that need to be done above and beyond the work of VRUs if we are to secure a safer society for children and young people in the long term.
The chapter consists of six sections. In the first section, we revisit and expand on the ‘Four Is’ framework. In the second section, we apply the Four Is framework to recent violence prevention initiatives. In the third section, we return to our conceptualisation of a holistic public health approach to violence prevention, explaining how it relates to and is enriched by the Four Is framework. In the fourth section, we discuss the future of VRUs. In the fifth section, we outline some potential limitations and pitfalls associated with the arguments made in this book. Finally, in the sixth section, we conclude the chapter.
Our central argument is that a truly holistic public health approach to violence prevention should entail coordinated and complementary work at four interconnected levels: the levels of inequalities, institutions, interventions, and interactions.
