How Scotland turned the tide on violent crime

As a journalist and trainee children’s counsellor, I am privileged to work with some of the UK’S leading mental health charities, and have interviewed neuroscientists, criminologists and child psychiatrists, looking at trauma in childhood and how it shapes the adult we become. But as my Panorama documentary tonight illustrates, it is often hard for children growing up in unsafe environments to articulate what they are feeling, and they don’t always trust that they will be heard.

I was intrigued to learn more about a bold experiment being undertaken in Scotland that had thrown convention out of the window and appeared to be working when it came to tackling violent crime. It began in 2005 when the World Health Organisation dubbed Glasgow the “murder capital of Europe”, and Scotland was declared by the UN to be the most violent country in the developed world. A Violence Reduction Unit (VRU) was set up and challenged to “think outside the box”.

The VRU’S founders believed that, to tackle the root causes of violent crime, it needed to be not just a criminal justice issue but much broader. So they reached out to agencies across the country, including in education, health, justice and the prison service.

One of the organisations they worked with was Medics Against Violence, a charity co-founded by oral surgeon Dr Christine Goodall. “There used to be a bit of a joke in Glasgow that it was the only city where they sold a lot of baseball bats and very few balls,” she told me. The A&E departments of Glasgow’s hospitals were left to deal with the horrific injuries sustained by victims and perpetrators, some as young as 11.

Dr Goodall had had enough. The charity trained and employed young people they called “navigators” to work in A&E departments, who aimed to talk gang members out of seeking vengeance the moment they left hospital and to take up offers of long-term, practical support instead.

Callum, now 26, was once a regular at A&E. He had a traumatic childhood, carried a knife from the age of 11, was an alcoholic by the age of 12, and spent his 16th, 18th and 21st birthdays in prison. “I was running around the East End of Glasgow like a cut-throat pirate,” he told me when we met in Polmont Young Offenders Institution, just outside Edinburgh. “But I was petrified. There was just a pure lethal absence of hope in my life, man.”

After walking home one night, he was stabbed nine times. “I go into A&E. A guy in a pink T-shirt kneeled down beside my bed, and he says to us, ‘How you doing, mate? I work for the Navigator programme for the Violence Reduction Unit.’ It’s one of the first times I can ever remember somebody saying, ‘Can I help you with anything?’.”

That conversation proved to be a crucial turning point.

Today Callum is proud to be a taxpayer, working with Police Scotland and the VRU as a mentor on programmes engaging with young offenders, offering them the same help he was offered: support with employment, training and counselling to help overcome addiction.

Niven Rennie, current director of Scotland’s VRU, is convinced of the power and effectiveness of employing people with “lived experience” to reach out to those the police most want to engage with.

James Docherty, a former gang member, also works with Niven at the VRU. He was involved in one of the first projects tackling the gang violence that was rife in Glasgow back in the early 2000s. “We were never going to punish these kids into a better way of living,” he says. “The lives they were living were already punishing enough.” Fast forward 15 years, and Glasgow has significantly reduced violent crime. “This is not about soft justice, it’s about smart justice,” both he and Rennie assert.

Across Scotland, the number of homicides dropped from 137 in 2004-2005 to 61 in 2018-2019. Violent crime fell from 14,728 reported cases in 2004-2005 to almost half that figure, at 8,008 in 2018-2019. But while violent crime is still lower than 1974 levels, it has been rising in the last few years, something Rennie believes is due to austerity – a warning, perhaps, as we consider the post Covid-19 months and years ahead.

“Poverty remains the underlying ailment of our time,” he says. “My fear is, after the virus has gone, we will doubtlessly see social gaps widen and numerous social issues present, not least rising levels of violence.”

Scotland still has a long way to go. It hasn’t entirely cracked the violence problem. But the message is clear. All the professionals I spoke to believe that trauma changes us, that hurt people hurt others, but that it doesn’t have to be that way.

Panorama: How Scotland cut Violent Crime is on BBC One tonight at 7.30pm