Networked violence: A relational approach to explain serious violence in the UK
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Cambridge
Department Name: Criminology
Abstract
Violence has been on the rise in the United Kingdom, generating a detrimental impact on the well-being of individuals and communities. Preventing serious violence is a crucial - yet difficult - task that calls for innovative thinking. This project aims at exploring the relational mechanisms underpinning serious violence (i.e., violence with injury) and then develop innovative evidence-based strategies to prevent individual involvement in such violence.
Previous research has explored both individual characteristics of offenders and community-level factors. However, the role of relational factors in generating - and sustaining - violence has been largely neglected. Yet, an emerging yet still limited body of works (mostly on offenders outside the UK) has shown that relations can have a stronger effect than individual factors. As in the spread of epidemics, networks - and contacts - matter in explaining, and preventing, adverse outcomes. This project builds upon network thinking in transforming the way we address serious violence in the UK. It integrates network factors into a tailored multi-level approach modelling the risk of both committing violence and of being a victim of violence as a function of individual factors, community factors, and network (relational) factors. Ultimately, in keeping with the WHO socio-ecological model for violence prevention, we aim to understand how micro-, meso-, and macro-level factors affect the vulnerability of individuals to the risk of violence (both committing and being a victim of violence), and how this risk can be mitigated.
The research will explore the emergence of violence both cross-sectionally and longitudinally, considering the dynamics underpinning violence escalation and contagion, clustering and cycles of violence over time. The main data source for the project is a large-scale police dataset containing data on crime events in Cambridgeshire with the associated anonymised information about victims and offenders. This dataset will be linked to ONS and Census data to bring community-level information into the picture, thus allowing for a multi-level approach to the study of the mechanisms underpinning violence. Such a study will generate a set of (relational) risk factors that can be actioned upon by practitioners to develop early interventions to prevent and break cycles of violence.
Previous research has explored both individual characteristics of offenders and community-level factors. However, the role of relational factors in generating - and sustaining - violence has been largely neglected. Yet, an emerging yet still limited body of works (mostly on offenders outside the UK) has shown that relations can have a stronger effect than individual factors. As in the spread of epidemics, networks - and contacts - matter in explaining, and preventing, adverse outcomes. This project builds upon network thinking in transforming the way we address serious violence in the UK. It integrates network factors into a tailored multi-level approach modelling the risk of both committing violence and of being a victim of violence as a function of individual factors, community factors, and network (relational) factors. Ultimately, in keeping with the WHO socio-ecological model for violence prevention, we aim to understand how micro-, meso-, and macro-level factors affect the vulnerability of individuals to the risk of violence (both committing and being a victim of violence), and how this risk can be mitigated.
The research will explore the emergence of violence both cross-sectionally and longitudinally, considering the dynamics underpinning violence escalation and contagion, clustering and cycles of violence over time. The main data source for the project is a large-scale police dataset containing data on crime events in Cambridgeshire with the associated anonymised information about victims and offenders. This dataset will be linked to ONS and Census data to bring community-level information into the picture, thus allowing for a multi-level approach to the study of the mechanisms underpinning violence. Such a study will generate a set of (relational) risk factors that can be actioned upon by practitioners to develop early interventions to prevent and break cycles of violence.
Organisations
Publications
| Description | The project is less than two months into the core analysis period. It is massively delayed due to staff and visa-related issues. Nonetheless, a first paper has already appeared studying the mechanisms of cooperation among organised crime groups and their impact on the level of violence. A key finding is that centrality in the cooperative network and violence are highly correlated at the organised crime group level (they are two faces of the same coin). Hence, there is a need to rethink the way we design violence interventions; these do not need to narrowly focus on violent outcomes to be effective (quite the opposite; medium-term interventions as well as early interventions might be more effective when they do not focus strictly on violent acts). This will be explored further in the remainder of the project. |
| Exploitation Route | Due to very consequential delays generated by staff and visa issues (retaining staff, recruiting new staff and visa-related procedures), the project started in earnest less than two months ago. It is, therefore, too early to discuss how the outcomes of this funding will be taken forward (although we anticipate those to be used by policy-makers and taken forward by academics and practitioners interested in network modelling and violence-reduction interventions, respectively). |
| Sectors | Communities and Social Services/Policy Education Security and Diplomacy |