Peter Henderson

I would like to see more rigorous evaluations of social policy interventions. This doesn’t just mean more randomised control trials (RCTs) but that is an important step. If we want more RCTs, how do we achieve this? I think it helps to learn about the situations where RCTs have happened in the past. Perhaps we…

Many people advocate for a public health approach to preventing violence. What does this actually mean? I’ve encountered several definitions and, despite them all being slightly different, I think they share some core ideas. I think the public health approach focuses on: populations over individuals harm reduction over blame prevention over punishment collaboration over silos…

Keir Irwin-Rogers and Luke Billingham’s book ‘Against Youth Violence’ has a nice summary of what we know about the nature of violence in England and Wales: Levels of violence in England and Wales have been declining since the mid-1990s: from over four million violent incidents in 1995 to just over one million incidents in 2020.…

A paper has been circulating twitter which suggests some ‘facts’ about crime. It seems unusually concrete and useful for an academic piece. These facts are: Crime is highly concentrated by place. Most crime happens in a small number of places (i.e. ‘hotspots). The concentration of crime is even greater if one focuses on more serious…

I’m reading Keir Irwin-Rogers and Luke Billingham’s Against Youth Violence. The first chapter has a good overview of sources of data on the prevalence of violence. It’s not easy to measure how much violence is happening – all the available sources have their strengths and limitations. Here’s a summary of the sources, their strengths and…