Types of abuse, exploitation and neglect

Tackling serious violence

The Government’s Serious Violence Strategy, published in April 2018, represents a step change in the way we think and respond to serious violence, establishing a new balance between prevention and law enforcement.

The strategy was published in response to increases in knife and gun crime and homicide across England and is framed on 4 key themes:

  1. Tackling county lines and misuse of drugs

  2. Early intervention and prevention

  3. Supporting communities and partnerships, and

  4. An effective law enforcement and criminal justice response

We need to use Contextual Safeguarding and Trauma Informed Practice to tackle exploitation and serious violence as these impact the same families.

From a violence prevention perspective, the World Health Organisation provides a four-step model underpinned by the following principles that a public health approach should be:

  1. Focused on a defined population, often with a health risk in common with and for communities

  2. Not constrained by organisational or professional boundaries

  3. Focussed on generating long term as well as short term solutions

  4. Based on data and intelligence to identify the burden on the population, including any inequalities and rooted in evidence of effectiveness to tackle the problem

There are several different “Public Health Approaches” to tackling serious violence which have been in place for several years. The Cure Violence Approach and the Glasgow Violence Reduction Unit consider violence as a contagious infectious disease which spreads between people, reproducing itself and shifting group norms.

They propose that this explains why one locality might see more stabbings or shootings than another area with many of the same social problems.

The CAPRICORN Approach - a public health approach to policing

Collaborative approaches to preventing offending and re-offending by children (CAPRICORN) sets out a framework to help local authorities prevent young people offending and re-offending, by looking at primary (or ‘upstream’) causes of offending, as well as secondary (or ‘downstream’) causes.

CAPRICORN’s focus is to describe some actions that local partnerships can take to prevent young people offending and re-offending at individual, family and community level.

CAPRICORN resource
PDF, 2300kb, 75 pages