This is a list of books and articles about violence prevention that I’ve found interesting or useful. It’s mainly for my own benefit but hopefully someone else finds it useful too.
It’s starting small but I will try to update it regularly with new topics. I will try to limit myself to five readings per topic. I’ll include readings because I found them interesting or useful not necessarily because I think they are correct. Please recommend any good reading in the comments!
Try clicking a link in this table of contents:
- Where to start?
- Policy context
- Important ideas
- How much violence happens?
- Why does violence happen?
- How can we prevent violence?
- Research databases
- Newsletters etc
Where to start?
Here are some good overviews to start with:
The Youth Endowment Fund’s Children, violence and vulnerability report gives an overview of recent trends.
The YEF Toolkit is an accessible summary of the best available research on approaches to preventing violence.
Bleeding out by Thomas Abt is a very accessible introduction to the evidence from a US perspective. His ‘people, places and behaviours’ model is simple but useful.
Policy context
Labour government 2024
Labour set themselves the mission of halving violent crime.
The King’s speech included three bills with relevant content (see the accompanying briefing doc):
- Crime and Policing Bill 2025
- Anti social behaviour. Introduce ‘Respect Orders’ which can be placed on adults persistently involved in ASB.
- Retail crime. Create a new offence of assaulting a shopworker.
- Knife crime. Increasing the maximum penalties for offences relating to the sale of weapons and introducing a new offence of possessing a bladed article with intent to use unlawful violence.
- Child criminal exploitation. Create new offences of child criminal exploitation and cuckooing. Introducing a new duty to report child sexual abuse. Making grooming behaviour a statutory aggravating factor
- Violence against women and girls. Introduce enhanced notification requirements on registered sex offenders, including a bar of them changing their names where there is a risk of sexual harm. Giving victims of stalking the right to know the identity of the perpetrator. Introducing a new criminal offence of administering a harmful substance (including spiking).
- Policing. Creating new police power to enter a premises without a warrant to search for and seize stolen goods. Expanding drug testing on arrest. Granting firearms officers subject to criminal proceedings anonymity up to the point of conviction.
- Victims, Courts and Public Protection Bill
- Strengthen powers of the victims commissioner
- Require offenders to attend their sentencing hearings
- Reduce delays in the courts system by allowing Associate Prosecutors to work on appropriate cases.
- Children’s Wellbeing Bill
- strengthening multi-agency child protection and safeguarding arrangements.
- requiring free breakfast clubs in every primary school
- creating a duty on local authorities to maintain Children Not in School registers
Conservative government 2018-2024
The Government published a serious violence strategy in 2018.
In 2019, the Government gave 18 police force areas funding to establish Violence Reduction Units. Here’s a useful collection of evaluations of the Violence Reduction Units.
The House of Commons Library is a fantastic resource for understanding any policy area. Here is their clear but now quite dated summary of developments in Government policy on serious violence. Here is a more recent summary.
The serious violence duty commenced in early 2023. Here is a useful primer.
This is a useful summary of Home Office funding allocations for violence prevention, including the Grip programme for hotspots and problem-oriented policing projects.
Legislation
The most recent legislation is the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022. It introduced:
- The serious violence duty. From early 2023, this will require local authorities, the police, criminal justice agencies, health and fire and rescue services to co-develop a local strategy for preventing serious violence.
- Serious violence reduction orders which are new stop and search powers that can be used against convicted knife or offensive weapons offenders. These only apply to adults for now but this will be reviewed after a pilot.
- Changes to the Youth Rehabilitation Order, a youth community sentence.
- Changes to the custodial sentences that children can receive.
- Measures to ensure that secure schools can operate as charities.
The Offensive Weapons Act 2019 introduced:
- New criminal offences of selling a corrosive product to someone under the age of 18 and possessing a corrosive substance in a public place.
- Amendments to existing legislation to make it a criminal offense to possess certain weapons (knuckledusters, zombie knives and death stars) in private. Selling or possessing these weapons in public was already a criminal offence.
- Knife crime prevention orders which can be used to impose certain conditions on people aged over 12 thought to be carrying knives. This could include curfews and restrictions on travel, as well as referral to rehabilitative interventions. A pilot started in London in 2021 but the policy could later be rolled out across England and Wales.
Important ideas
The public health approach
Here’s my own attempt at describing the public health approach.
A nice blog by a public health doctor about the ‘public health approach to anything’.
This Public Health England report provides an overview of various attempts to take a public health approach to violence prevention.
Most TED talks are rubbish… This one by Gary Slutkin is amazing. Gary talks about why it could be useful to think of violence as a disease.
Public Health England have proposed the CAPRICORN model.
How much violence happens?
Measuring violence
Here’s my summary of the data sources on the prevalence of violence in England and Wales and their strengths and limitations.
The ONS on understanding the complexities of crime statistics.
This website is a bit hard to navigate but it looks like it has lots of useful data on historical trends from across the world.
This site tracks homicides in London: https://www.murdermap.co.uk/
Useful summaries
The Youth Endowment Fund’s Children, violence and vulnerability report gives an overview of recent trends in the rate of violent incidents. The Youth Endowment Fund also publishes regular stats updates. For example:
Our World in Data do great summaries, including this on the international data on homicides.
The first chapter of Against Youth Violence by Keir Irwin-Rogers and Luke Billingham has a useful overview of long-term trends in violence in England and Wales. Here is my summary of the chapter.
The ONS publishes annual releases on the nature of violent crime in England and Wales.
This House of Commons Library briefing on knife crime statistics.
Why does violence happen?
Overviews
This systematic review surveys existing reviews on what is associated with involvement in crime and violence. A massive project worth reading about!
This paper is a good intro to some basic information about how crime happens. It lists seven basic facts, such as the fact that crime clusters in people, times and places. And the fact that offenders don’t specialise in particular offences.
Brain injury
It’s quite dated now (particularly the sections on ‘candidate gene’ studies) but this book by Adrian Raine is still useful.
This report is a useful overview on the impact of traumatic brain injuries.
Child criminal exploitation, modern slavery and ‘county lines‘
SPACE has collated an excellent reading list. It’s worth exploring the rest of that site too.
HMI Probation has a really clear introduction to county lines, written by John Pitts.
The House of Commons Library has this accessible briefing on the link between county lines and serious youth violence, and Government attempts to intervene.
Simon Harding’s book is full of rich qualitative detail from hundreds of interviews with people involved in county lines.
How can we prevent violence?
Overviews
The YEF Toolkit is an accessible summary of the best available research on approaches to preventing violence.
If you want to explore the research in more detail and find individual studies, go to the YEF Evidence and Gap Map.
The EIF Guidebook is the one-stop shop for information about specific programmes.
Bleeding out by Thomas Abt is a very accessible introduction to the evidence from a US perspective. His ‘people, places and behaviours’ model is simple but useful.
Data sharing
If agencies became better at sharing information with each other, could they learn more about why and where violence happens?
The Cardiff model is one approach that involves combining data from hospital admissions with police data to understand where and how violence is happening. Page 95 of this free e-book has a good description.
Hotspots policing
Violence tends to cluster in particular locations or ‘hot spots’. The research suggests focusing police attention and resources on these locations can reduce violence.
This Toolkit summary describes the overall research.
This study looks at the use of PCSOs to conduct the patrols and has good practical advice for defining hotspots.
Hotspots policing seems to work but it’s hard to do sustainably. This is a thoughtful piece on the implementation issues.
Research databases
The YEF has produced two evidence and gap maps – comprehensive databases of relevant research.
The WHO maintains preventviolence.info.
Newsletters etc
Here are some good resources for staying up to date.
- Mark Cooper provides an excellent weekly summary of policy developments in crime and justice. You can sign up at www.greymalkinconsulting.com.
- Russell Webster produces a regular blog covering crime and justice issues: https://www.russellwebster.com/.
- I also like the CJI and YJB newsletters.
- CYP Now Youth Justice https://www.cypnow.co.uk/youth-justice
- The House of Commons library is excellent for impartial summaries of recent policy developments.
Peter Henderson 