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As part of its safer streets mission, the UK Government has made some big pledges about violence prevention. The safer streets mission aims to reduce harm and increase public confidence in policing and in the criminal justice system. Integral to the safer streets mission is the UK Government’s ambition to halve knife crime and halve violence against women and girls (VAWG) by 2035.
Alongside introducing policy measures, such as making spiking a criminal offence; banning lethal weapons; increasing neighbourhood policing; and improving protections for victims and survivors, there is a commitment to prevention by addressing the underlying causes of violence, including targeting social norms that enable or promote violence. In Wales, we have specific legislation to cover Violence Against Women, Domestic Abuse and Sexual Violence (VAWDASV) with the Welsh Government’s Violence against Women, Domestic Abuse and Sexual Violence (Wales) Act 2015 and their VAWDASV Strategy 2022-26 which also makes early intervention and prevention a priority.
With both governments championing prevention, Public Health Wales’ Violence Prevention Programme Lead, Lara Snowdon, writes the first in a series of blog posts reflecting on the UK Government’s safer streets mission, and how this supports violence prevention in Wales. This first blog explores how a focus on primary prevention is critical to the UK Government’s ambition to halve Violence against Women and Girls (VAWG) and knife crime.
We welcome the UK Government’s focus on prevention and the commitment to halve VAWG and knife crime in the next decade. Violence is a public health crisis which has an untold cost to the health and wellbeing of individuals, families, and society. Violence and trauma can cause physical, mental and emotional harms which can have lifelong, devastating impacts.
Achieving the UK Government’s ambitious commitments requires a public health approach with a focus on prevention. A public health approach is a way of working that focuses on the health, safety and wellbeing of an entire population. It draws upon multi-disciplinary evidence to take a systematic approach to reducing the prevalence of violence across a population. The tools of a public health approach, and practitioner skills, have been used to make step changes in other serious public health problems, such as smoking or infectious disease control.
The ambition of a public health approach is to generate systemic change to reduce the prevalence of violence. To do this requires a whole-system approach where everyone – communities, families, the NHS, police, schools and education settings, charities and community organisations, as well as Welsh, UK and local governments – have a role to play.
Primary prevention aims to prevent violence before it occurs. As a society, if we are serious about reducing the prevalence of violence, we must invest in and fully resource primary prevention. Preventing violence at scale, is not about one-off interventions. It requires a coordinated whole-system approach which modifies risk factors and amplifies protective factors across the life-course.
A whole-system approach should span the ‘social-ecology’ (including support for individuals and families, through to community-based interventions and societal and legislative change) and across the life-course. Wales Without Violence: a Shared Framework for Preventing Violence among Children and Young People – is an example of a framework for understanding and implementing a range of strategies for primary prevention and early intervention. Other frameworks for violence prevention include the World Health Organization’s RESPECT and INSPIRE frameworks which can be used to inform a strategic and coordinated response to primary prevention.
Some primary prevention strategies are universal i.e. they are delivered to the whole population. Other strategies for primary prevention are targeted towards a specific audience or cohort. Implementing primary prevention interventions may have public health impacts that range beyond the intended outcome. For example, an intervention to promote healthy relationships in schools could prevent violence, improve sexual health and mental wellbeing, however, it may also increase disclosures of violence. These consequences should be predicted and carefully planned for as part of intervention development, delivery and evaluation, to ensure that disclosures can be safely managed as part of a trauma-informed approach.
Effective primary prevention should be evidence and theory-based, informed by data, and coproduced with the community it is intended to serve. Effective strategies are more likely to have a long duration, be appropriately timed, have skilled trainers/ facilitation, and be culturally and socially relevant to the target audience. Primary prevention should be grounded in human rights, be trauma-informed, and promote equity.
In recent years, Wales has made significant steps to develop and implement a public health approach to violence prevention. Examples of strategic approaches to preventing violence include:
The next blog post in this series will explore effective strategies for violence prevention
