Scotland’s Violence Reduction Unit is without doubt the national success story of the last decade.
Set up in 2005, the VRU was given a remit to view violence not merely as a matter of criminal justice but, crucially, as a public health issue.
This approach was rooted in the understanding that violence, at the level of culture, behaves much like a contagious disease and is likelier to present and spread in specific conditions.
Under the guidance of former police officers John Carnochan and, later, Karyn McLuskey, the VRU challenged every level of Scottish society – from leading politicians, police, judges and health professionals to perpetrators of violence – to think longer and harder about violence and its root causes.
The VRU has confidently carved out its own lane in Scottish public life, drip-feeding its increasingly sophisticated reading of the cultures of violence that exist into the bodies of public and professional opinion on the issue.
Now it seems like every other week, another reduction in some form of violence or other is being reported. This week, a study estimated that serious crime in Scotland fell by about 30 per cent in the last 10 years.
What has been omitted from the success story is how radical the notion of the VRU was at the start and how radical its programmes and initiatives remain.
In the VRU’s success, Scotland has a valuable lesson to learn about looking beyond the status quo for solutions to its stubborn and recurring social problems.
In a society governed by a consensus which is shaped almost exclusively by the diversity of views found among the middle-class, the word “radical” creates a lot of anxiety.
For many, radical is simply another way of saying “higher taxes”, “increased state-regulation” and – perhaps the ultimate bogeyman in a world ruled by free-markets – “public ownership”.
In truth, radicalism, in the technical sense, means simply to innovate a new way of approaching a problem.
What makes something radical is the manner in which it disrupts a previously accepted way of doing something, by looking beyond the status quo for solutions.
While many among the chattering classes get nervous whenever radicalism is mentioned, the truth is that many of the cornerstones of modern society began as radical,
What would eventually become the London Underground, for example, was a laughably radical idea, at first, because it was such an ambitious undertaking.
The status quo prior to the opening of the Thames Tunnel – the world’s first underwater tunnel – was an atrociously congested, inefficient and deeply unpleasant seaport. From our vantage point in the present day, the Thames Tunnel was an inevitable innovation.
It is, therefore, quite hard to imagine that many respectable, accomplished and learned folks in media, business and government scoffed at the idea.
Just as extremism of all kinds must be guarded against, so, too, must the ever-polite barriers
to reform that cross-sections of Scotland’s middle-class have come to represent.
If the VRU teaches us anything beyond the topic of violence itself, it’s that we must not, as a society, be frightened to try something radically different when all other status quo-sanctioned solutions have failed.
