A ‘public health approach’ to violence will mean hospitals and schools will be legally required to report suspicions that young people are in danger of causing violence or are being groomed by gangs, the Home Office has suggested. Examples suggested that the professionals will have to report by law include someone arriving in A&E with a suspicious injury, and ‘worrying behaviour’ at school.
As a consultation document says, serious violence can be due to ‘county lines’ drug‑selling whereby gangs from major urban areas such as London, Birmingham and Liverpool have sought to exploit markets in smaller towns. Someone can carry out violence – or be a victim – due to ‘risk factors’ including domestic abuse, truancy, school exclusions and substance abuse, the document adds. Hence the Government seeks a ‘multi-agency preventative approach’ by ‘education, health, social services, housing, youth and victim services’, with an ’emphasis on early intervention and prevention with young people’.
The document harks back to the Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships (CDRPs), as set up under the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, when local government was given a statutory duty to act on crime and disorder, including against local business. Likewise schools and hospitals will have to have, the Government proposes, ‘due regard to the prevention and tackling of serious violence’. Similarly under the Counter Terrorism and Security Act 2015, universities and others must have ‘due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism’ (as featured in the April 2019 print issue of Professional Security magazine).
As the document notes, the Violence Reduction Unit in Scotland as a national centre of expertise on violence and as part of Police Scotland, has taken a public health approach, without specific statutory duties on health and education practitioners; likewise the Labour Mayor of London Sadiq Khan in September 2018, announced a multi-disciplinary Violence Reduction Unit.
What would the multi-agency approach actually mean for the agencies – such as hospitals and schools? The document says; regular sharing between agencies of data and intelligence, to make ‘early interventions’ and joint funding for services to do so. And as for how agencies will be held to account, it’ll be through inspections by their inspectorates; maybe jointly inspected. How will children’s homes, colleges and so forth know how to tackle knife violence? The Government would publish guidance.
For the 33-page consultation document visit gov.uk. This consultation closes on May 28.
