Networked violence: A relational approach to explain serious violence in the UK

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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.