Archives

Natural Language Processing: Improving Data Integrity of Police Recorded Crime

By Darren Cook, Research Fellow in Natural Language Processing at City, University of London

Did you know that police recorded crime data for England and Wales are not accredited by the UK’s Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR)? This decision, made by the OSR after an audit in 2014, was due to concerns about the reliability of the underlying data.

Various factors affect the quality of police-recorded data. Differences in IT systems, personnel decision-making, and a lack of knowledge-sharing all contribute to reduced quality and consistency. Poor data integrity leads to a lack of standardisation across police forces and an increase in inaccurate or missing entries. I recently spoke about this issue at the Behavioural and Social Sciences in Security (BASS) conference at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland.

Correcting missing values is no small feat. In a dataset of 18,000 police recorded domestic violence incidents, we found over 4,500 (25%) missing entries for a single variable. Let’s assume it takes 30 seconds to find the correct value for this variable – that’s 38 hours of effort – almost a full working week. Given that there could be as many as twenty additional variables, it would take over four months to populate all the missing values in our dataset. Expanding such effort across multiple police forces and for multiple types of crime highlights the inefficiency of human-effort in this endeavour.

In my talk, I outlined an automated solution to this problem using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and supervised machine learning (ML). NLP describes the processes and techniques used by machines to understand human language, and supervised ML describes how machines learn to predict an outcome based on previously seen examples. In this case, we sought to predict the relationship between the victim and offender – an important piece of demographic information vital to ensuring victim safety.

The proposed system would use a text-based crime ‘note’ completed by a police officer to classify the victim offender relationship as either ‘Ex-Partner”, “Partner”, or “Family” – in keeping with the distinction made by Women’s Aid. Crime notes are an often-overlooked source of information in police data, yet we found they consistently referenced the victim-offender relationship. The goal of our system, therefore, was to extract the salient information from the free-form crime notes and populate the corresponding missing value in our structured data fields.

Existing solutions based on keywords and syntax parsing are used by multiple UK police forces. While effective, they require manual effort to create, update, and maintain the dictionaries, and they don’t generalise well. Our supervised ML system, however, can be automatically updated and monitored to maintain accuracy.

When tested, our system achieved 80% accuracy, correctly labelling the relationship type in four out of five cases. In comparison, humans performed this task with approximately 82% accuracy – an arguably negligible difference. Moreover, once trained, our system could classify the entire test set (over 1,000 crime notes) in just sixteen seconds.

However, we noted some limitations, the biggest of which was a high linguistic overlap in crime notes between ‘Ex-Partner’ and ‘Partner’ that caused several misclassifications. We believe more advanced language models (i.e., word embeddings) will improve discrimination between these relationships.

We also discovered a potential prediction bias against minorities. Although victim ethnicity wasn’t included in our training setup, we observed reduced accuracy for Black or Asian victims. The source and extent of this bias are subjects of ongoing research.

Our findings highlight the promise of automated solutions but serve as a cautionary tale against assuming these systems can be applied carte blanche without careful consideration of their limitations. Several outstanding questions remain. Is a system with 80% accuracy good enough? Is it better to leave missing values rather than predict incorrect ones? Incorrectly identifying a perpetrator as a current partner rather than an ex-partner could significantly impact the victim’s safety. Additionally, a model biased against certain ethnicities risks overlooking the specific needs of minority groups.

The conference sparked lively and engaging conversation about many of these issues, as well as the role that automation can be play within the social sciences more broadly. A research article describing these results in full is the focus of ongoing work, and the presentation slides are available below as a download.

For further information please contact Darren at darren.cook@city.ac.uk or via LinkedIn @darrencook1986

Dr Darren Cook, An application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) to free-form Police crime notes – 1 download

D Cook_NLP and PoliceDownload

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Uncovering ‘hidden’ violence against older people

By Dr Anastasia Fadeeva, VISION Research Fellow

Violence against older people is often overlooked. As a society, we often associate violence with young people, gangs, unsafe streets, and ‘knife crime’. However, violence also takes place behind front doors, perpetuated by families and partners, and victims include older people. 

Some older people may be particularly vulnerable due to poorer physical health, disability, dependence on others, and financial challenges after retirement. Policy rarely addresses the safety of this population, with even health and social care professionals sometimes assuming that violence does not affect older people. For example, doctors may dismiss injuries or depression as inevitable problems related to old age and miss opportunities to identify victims (1). In addition, older people may be less likely to report violence and abuse because they themselves may not recognise it, do not want to accuse family members, or out of fear (2). 

Given victims of violence often remain invisible to health and social services, police, or charities, the most reliable statistics on violence often come from national surveys such as the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) conducted by the Office for National Statistics. However, for a long time the CSEW self-completion – the part of the interview with the most detail on violence and abuse – excluded those aged 60 or more, and only recently extended to include those over 74. Some national surveys specifically focus on older people, but these ask very little about violence and abuse. Additionally, despite people in care homes or other institutional settings experiencing a higher risk of violence, it can be challenging to collect information from them. Therefore, many surveys only interview people in private households, which excludes many higher-risk groups.

We need a better grasp of the extent and nature of violence and abuse in older populations. First, reliable figures can improve the allocation of resources and services targeted at the protection of older people. Second, better statistics can identify the risk factors for experiencing violence in later life and the most vulnerable groups.

In the VISION consortium, we used the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey (APMS 2014) to examine violence in people aged 60 and over in England (3). While we found that older people of minoritised ethnic backgrounds are at higher risk of violence (prevalence of 6.0% versus 1.7% in white people in 12 months prior to the survey), more research needs to be done to distinguish the experiences of different ethnic groups. Our research also showed that loneliness and social isolation were strongly related to violence in later life. Older people may experience social isolation due to limiting health issues or economic situations, and perpetrators can exploit this (4). Moreover, isolation of victims is a tool commonly used by perpetrators, especially in cases of domestic abuse (5).  Knowing about these and other risk factors can help us better spot and protect potential victims.

Additionally, more needs to be learnt about the consequences of life course exposure to violence for health and well-being in later life. This is still a relatively unexplored area due to limited data and a lack of reporting from older victims and survivors. It is sometimes more difficult to establish the link between violence and health problems because the health impacts are not always immediate but can accumulate or emerge in later life (6). Also, as people develop more illnesses as they age, it is more challenging to distinguish health issues attributable to violence. Therefore we are also using the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) to examine temporal relationships between lifetime violence exposure and health in older age.

In an inclusive society, every member should be able to lead a life where they feel safe and respected. We are delighted that the CSEW has removed the upper age limit to data collection on domestic abuse, which is one step towards making older victims and survivors heard. Continuous work on uncovering the ‘hidden’ statistics and examining the effects of intersectional characteristics on violence is crucial in making our society more inclusive, equal, and safe for everyone. For example, one VISION study (7) has demonstrated that the risks of repeated victimisation in domestic relationships had opposite trends for men and women as they aged. We are committed to support the Hourglass Manifesto to end the abuse of older people (8), and are willing to provide decision makers with evidence to enable a safer ageing society.

For further information, please see: Violence against older people and associations with mental health: A national probability sample survey of the general population in England – ScienceDirect

Or please contact Anastasia at anastasia.fadeeva@city.ac.uk

Footnotes

  • 1.  SafeLives U. Safe later lives: Older people and domestic abuse, spotlights report. 2016.
  • 2.  Age UK. No Age Limit: the blind spot of older victims and survivors in the Domestic Abuse Bill. 2020.
  • 3.  Fadeeva A, Hashemi L, Cooper C, Stewart R, McManus S. Violence against older people and mental health: a probability sample survey of the general population. forthcoming.
  • 4.  Tung EL, Hawkley LC, Cagney KA, Peek ME. Social isolation, loneliness, and violence exposure in urban adults. Health Affairs. 2019;38(10):1670-8.
  • 5.  Stark E. Coercive control. Violence against women: Current theory and practice in domestic abuse, sexual violence and exploitation. 2013:17-33.
  • 6.  Knight L, Hester M. Domestic violence and mental health in older adults. International review of psychiatry. 2016;28(5):464-74.
  • 7.  Weir R. Differentiating risk: The association between relationship type and risk of repeat victimization of domestic abuse. Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice. 2024;18:paae024.
  • 8.  Hourglass. Manifesto A Safer Ageing Society by 2050. 2024.

Photo from licensed Adobe Stock library

Un-Siloing Securitization: An intersectional intervention

By Dr Alexandria (Andri) Innes, VISION researcher and Senior Lecturer in International Politics at City, UoL

This research makes a case for shifting how we use and think about securitization theory. Securitization theory conventionally offers some insight into how certain issues are brought under the umbrella of security – normally state security – rather than sitting in normal political debate. When something is securitized more extreme or authoritarian policies that would normally be controversial in liberal democracies can be used. This might include things like removing civil liberties such as freedom of speech or freedom of assembly, or indefinite detention, or even policies that we’re all familiar with from 2020 and 2021, prohibiting freedom of association and freedom of movement in public space.

Securitization theory has focused on process (how something becomes securitized), object (what is securitized), and subject (who is being protected). The latter is generally the state and/or society. The process works through a meaningful speech act suggesting something is a security issue or framing it in security language (think about the war on drugs or the war on terror). The speech act then has to be accepted by an audience, who might be society at large, or the public, but also might be specialist practitioners, policy makers, think tanks, civil society, educators and so on. And the object of securitization is anything where this type of totalising discourse is evident. Examples include health, transnational crime, climate change, religion, humanitarianism, terrorism, particular ethnic identities, and immigration along with plenty of other things.

In this article, I argue that we should consider inequality when deconstructing and attempting to understand the process and practice of securitization. I suggest that racialization, ethnicization, and gendering create structural inequality in the ordering of what we think of as international – a world composed of equal state units. The nation state relies on these processes to function as an identity unit in the way that it does (with passport carrying, rights-bearing citizens and the right to deny rights to people who are not in the correct in-group). I propose that securitization theory might do better at dealing with inequality of we focus on the experience of being securitized, more so than the speech acts that make that securitization happen.

The article functioned more as a review of this sub-paradigm, and turns attention to the way the ‘object’ part tends to be siloed into the relevant thematic areas. So we look to just one securitized object at a time. Here, the article looks instead at three processes of securitization, to show that the siloing means the forms of inequality inherent in the nation state and national security are reproduced rather than reckoned with.

I look at the securitization of health, the securitization of immigration, and the securitization of gender-based violence. I suggest by mapping these objects of securitization together, we can better see the intersectional violence of inequality played out, and make visible the vulnerability, inequality and violence that pre-exists securitization, but is also enhanced, aggravated and at times hidden by it.

For further information please see: Un-siloing securitization: an intersectional intervention | International Politics (springer.com)

Or contact Andri at alexandria.innes@city.ac.uk

Photo from licensed Adobe Stock library

Cyberbullying and social media user-verification

Social media platforms enable people to communicate in both positive and negative ways, including in ways that may be abusive and bullying. Abusive messaging can harm mental health, and has been shown to increase during periods of public crisis, such the Covid pandemic. There is a need to better identify and classify cyberbullying and online abuse, to improve the design of deterrence strategies.

In a recently published study VISION researcher Dr Lifang Li explored how the ‘verification status’ of social media user accounts was associated with cyberbullying. Verification refers to when a social media user’s identity has been confirmed, for example by the checking of an identity card. Lifang examined data from China’s main social media platform, Weibo, to classify messages that had been posted during the pandemic about people who were diagnosed with the coronavirus. She examined the content of posts made by users who were verified and unverified, used techniques to understand how often anger-related words were used, and measured the extent to which the posts got shared.

Posts that could be classified as critical of people diagnosed with Covid during the pandemic (for example, describing them as ‘reckless’ or ‘selfish’ for having contracted the infection) were in the minority, most social media users were understanding or neutral in their online communications. Lifang found that posts that were critical of people diagnosed with Covid were more likely to use anger-related words. Although not a focus of the paper, official verification of a social media user’s identity did not appear to be strongly related to how likely they were to post or repost critical views.

However, male verified social media users were more likely than unverified or female users to have their posts shared. This suggests that their online activity may have a disproportionate impact on other users. Cyberbullying monitoring may need to consider such differences, especially in the context of public health crises.

This study made novel use of machine learning techniques, which may help other researchers developing algorithms to identify abusive posts online.

For further information, please read the publication at Frontiers | Social media users’ attitudes toward cyberbullying during the COVID-19 pandemic: associations with gender and verification status (frontiersin.org) or contact VISION researcher and study co-author Angus Roberts at angus.roberts@kcl.ac.uk.

Photo from licensed Adobe Stock library

The next generation of researchers studying violence

by City criminology undergraduate student, Matilde Sciarrini

As a Criminology with Data Analytics student, I had the opportunity to complete a work placement at the Violence and Society Centre (VASC), through the Q-step programme, which aims to improve quantitative skills in social science students. My initial interest in VASC and their main research project, the VISION Consortium, stemmed from the desire to better understand the different experiences of victims of violent crimes, and the amount of support they received from their family, friends and social services. 

The work placement took place one day a week for 10 weeks, during which I was tasked to analyse crime reporting trends, by utilising the Crime Survey for England and Wales. This survey is divided into a non-victim form, which gathers general demographic information about the respondents, such as sex, age and ethnicity; and a victim form, specifically asking about crimes they experienced in the past year.  

During the first few weeks, I selected the relevant variables, refined by recoding skills, and harmonised the variables from 2001 to 2020. The variables I selected for my analysis included: 

  • Did the police come to know about the matter?  
  • How did they come to know about it?  
  • Can you tell me why you decided to report this crime to the police?  
  • Can you tell me why you decided NOT to report this crime to the police? 
  • Do you think the police treated you fairly?  
  • Were you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way in which you were able to report the matter? 

I decided to specifically focus on violent and sexual crimes for my analysis. This analysis emphasised the importance of understanding the various reasons for reporting and not reporting violent crimes to the police amongst different groups in society. This would not only help explain the discrepancy between police-recorded crime and the figures from the national victimization survey (Crime Survey for England and Wales), but it would aid in more effectively addressing the victim’s specific socio-cultural needs.    

My experience at the Centre was insightful and a valuable opportunity to understand the working of a research centre firsthand. I found that VASC was a more sociable environment than what I had anticipated. Everyone I met was open to provide coding guidance throughout the workday. Moreover, a productive degree of teamwork took place at the Centre, with full-staff meetings occurring on a weekly basis and constant communication between colleagues. This high level of teamwork was also present in their work, with multiple coding debates taking place every day. Although I had no previous knowledge of the Stata software, I was given the opportunity to learn and utilise it as part of my code. 

This placement gave me the opportunity not only to enhance my data analysis skills, but to further learn how to work in an office environment and improve my communication with others. I have come to understand how my criminological knowledge can contribute to research, and how it can shape social policies and affect governmental practices. I thoroughly enjoyed the placement since the very first week, having learned the importance of seeking assistance as well as independently solving problems.

Finally, I am grateful for the help and support of my line managers at VASC/VISION, who were always open to provide help and feedback about my work and my future career aspirations. I consider myself very fortunate to have had such an amazing opportunity, and I would encourage others to take an interest in the ongoing work at the Centre.   

Consultation response to the revised Statutory Guidance for the Conduct of Domestic Homicide Reviews

This post is by Dr James Rowlands, Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Westminster and Dr Elizabeth Cook, Senior Lecturer at the Violence and Society Centre at City, University of London and Co-Investigator of the VISION consortium research project.

The post draws on a consultation response to the revised Statutory Guidance for the Conduct of Domestic Homicide Reviews prepared by James, Lizzie, and Sarah Dangar, PhD candidate at City, University of London.

Last month, the Home Office launched the draft revised statutory guidance for conducting domestic homicide reviews with an open consultation ongoing until 29th July 2024.

What to make of it? On the one hand, a revision is well overdue, given the guidance was last issued in 2016. Considering the developments in the domestic abuse policy landscape, it was likely that significant changes to the statutory guidance were going to be required. First, by 2023, around 1000 reviews had been completed. Therefore, 13 years after their first implementation and seven years since the last revision to the statutory guidance, we have a better sense of what works and what does not. Second, the government’s reform agenda – including the introduction of a DHR library, the change to the definition and naming of reviews, the roll-out of training for chairs, and the development of an oversight mechanism by the Domestic Abuse Commissioner – means that there is an ever-developing framework to support the conduct of reviews. Third, the evidence base on reviews is expanding. That includes a better picture of case profiles, learning, and recommendations. The recent reports from Beyond the Streets (looking at reviews concerning individuals involved in the sex industry) and HALT (reporting on an analysis of a sample of 302 reviews following domestic abuse-related deaths between 2012 and 2019) are examples of this. There is also an increasing amount of research into how reviews are undertaken, including research which has explored their complexity in practice (see, for example, this recent article into ethics in review that we authored with colleagues). Yet, much also remains unclear, including the impact that reviews have and the best way to track this (as summarised in this recent article).

Given all these developments, any revision to the statutory guidance needed to be more than an update in content: it also needed to set out a future direction of travel and account for what’s been achieved.

So, does the draft revised statutory guidance deliver and address the need for an update while also taking on these broader issues?

That’s something we have been considering, and which led us to bring stakeholders together online and in person at a roundtable last week in an event co-hosted by the Violence and Society Centre (City, University of London) as part of the UKPRP-funded VISION consortium, and Westminster University’s Centre for Social Justice Research (CSJR). The aim of the roundtable wasn’t to develop a shared consultation response because individual attendees and their organisations will be doing that for themselves. Instead, we wanted to create a space for dialogue. Given the rich and varied conversations between the stakeholders about the draft revised statutory guidance, we think it’s fair to say we achieved that aim. Moreover, if the conversations we heard are a guide, the Home Office will receive some well-thought-through submissions from various stakeholders in due course.

The roundtable was also an opportunity for us to test our thinking. Since then, having worked to finalise our own consultation response, simply put, our view is that while the draft of the revised statutory guidance is a start, it doesn’t go far enough.

Let’s begin with the positives. There are some valuable changes, including breaking the text into different sections and introducing more detailed templates. It is also good to see a commitment to underlying principles, including learning and implementing change, the importance of being victim-centred and trauma-informed, and the role of family and others who knew a victim. In addition, the requirement of a rationale from Community Safety Partnerships (CSPs) where a decision is made not to commission a review is a very positive step in increasing the transparency of commissioning processes at a local level. Other changes relate to detail on what it means to be an Independent Chair in practice and the Panel as ‘co-producers’.

Yet, at the same time, as drafted, the revised statutory guidance seems incomplete, lacking in both breadth and depth.

For example, while an emphasis on being victim-centred and trauma-informed is welcome, how to achieve and operationalise this in practice is unclear. There are also significant gaps. For example, while recognising the importance of expertise on a review panel, the draft leaves unaddressed questions of capacity (both for Community Safety Partnerships who commission reviews and to ensure specialist domestic abuse service and led-by-and-for provision is around the table). Missing, too, is a workable definition of what constitutes a domestic abuse-related suicide, something that we know is affecting commissioning decisions (as explored in this article). Even more, the draft guidance risks repeating the confusion around suicides by extending the scope of reviews to include deaths from neglect and unexplained circumstances while similarly leaving them undefined. Finally, the sections on what happens after a review – including publication and the delivery of action plans – lack detail.

Given reviews are a response to profound trauma for families and communities, as drafted, the changes proposed do not match the importance of the task. In short, there is more to do to ensure we can work together to honour victims, hold perpetrators accountable, identify and share learning, and drive meaningful change.

To progress this work, we make a simple call: we would encourage the Home Office to adopt the spirit and practice of review. To do that, we make two important recommendations. First, the Home Office should review its mechanisms for oversight and accountability to date. This means undertaking an appraisal of its responsibility over reviews since 2011 and what has changed since this point. Second, the Home Office should engage in meaningful co-production as it moves forward, ideally by establishing a taskforce that includes representation from key stakeholders to complete the work to finalise the revised statutory guidance.

We’ve set out our thinking on the draft revised statutory guidance, including how to develop it further, in a consultation response co-written with Sarah Dangar. While we hope that the UK government will consider our recommendations, we also hope that our response is of interest to others as they finalise their consultation responses too. You can access our consultation response to read and / or download below.

If you would like to respond to the consultation, further information, as well as guidance on how to submit a response is available here.

A written response from Dr James Rowlands, Dr Elizabeth Cook & Sarah Dangar – 1 download

DHR-Statutory-Guidance-Consultation-ResponseDownload

Unleashing social media potential to research violence against women and girls in Iran

Researching violence against women and girls (VAWG) in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) presents unique challenges, primarily due to various contextual factors that hinder conventional survey methodologies. These challenges include limited funding, political obstacles, and safety concerns for both researchers and participants. Consequently, traditional survey approaches may prove unfeasible or inadequate in capturing the complex realities of VAWG in these settings.

VAWG is a particularly pressing issue in Iran, a Middle Eastern country marked by its patriarchal structure and systematic and pervasive gender discrimination. The patriarchal and legal structure of the country perpetuates gender inequalities and reinforces societal norms that tolerate or even condone violence against women. Yet, understanding the full scope of VAWG in Iran remains hindered by a lack of robust data.

In a recently published study, VISION researchers, Ladan Hashemi and Sally McManus, collaborated with counterparts from Bristol University (Nadia Aghtaie) and Iran (Fateme Babakhani) to explore the effectiveness of social media in recruiting victims of violence in Iran, shedding light on their experiences and the potential of social media as a research tool.

The findings revealed valuable insights into the manifestation and context of VAWG in Iran. Social media recruitment proved to be effective in reaching a diverse sample of victims and provided crucial insights into the dynamics of violence, the identities of perpetrators, and the settings where violence occurs. Victims often reported experiences from more than one type of perpetrator, spanning both public and domestic spheres. While social media recruitment offers broad reach and a safer environment for data collection, it also presents challenges such as sampling biases which affect the generalisability of findings.

For further information please see: Social Sciences | Free Full-Text | Using Social Media to Recruit Seldom-Heard Groups: Reaching Women and Girls with Experience of Violence in Iran (mdpi.com)

Or contact Ladan at ladan.hashemi@city.ac.uk  

Photo from licensed Adobe Stock library

Prevalence of sexual violence victimisation amongst mental health service users

Researchers from King’s College London, Anjuli Kaul, Laura Connell-Jones, Sharli Anne Paphitis and Sian Oram (VISION researcher), have published a systematic review and meta-analyses in Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology which provides up-to-date estimates on the prevalence and risk of sexual violence victimisation amongst mental health service users.

This review pooled data from 26 studies encompassing a total of 197,194 participants. Sexual violence included any sexual acts, comments or advances (or attempts at said behaviours) made towards a person without their consent. Mental health service users included any person who had been in contact with a psychiatric inpatient, outpatient, community, perinatal, liaison, addiction, veteran psychiatric inpatient, or forensic mental health service.

The researchers searched 3 electronic databases (Medline, Embase, and PsychINFO) for peer-reviewed publications from their dates of inception until 18th July 2022. There were no restrictions on the geographic location of the included studies.

Key findings

The review found that studies consistently showed a high prevalence of past year and adult lifetime (since the age of 16) sexual violence victimisation in psychiatric service users, with higher rates found in women than men. Additionally, both male and female psychiatric service users were found to have an increased risk of experiencing sexual violence compared to non-psychiatric service users. This was the case regardless of whether the study measured past year or adult lifetime sexual violence or sampled a population of inpatients, outpatients or both.

The meta-analyses revealed high levels of heterogeneity within the data, which was likely partly due to the varied instruments used across studies to measure mental health and sexual violence. Additionally, there was not enough data available to calculate the pooled odds ratio of sexual violence victimisation for male or female psychiatric service users, nor was it possible to adjust odds ratios for known confounders such as age, ethnicity, income level or substance abuse.

The findings emphasise the need for healthcare practitioners to effectively recognise and respond to sexual violence in mental health services, and the need for a comprehensive and consistent measurement framework for sexual violence to enable reliable and comparable prevalence data to be collected.

 For further information please see: Prevalence and risk of sexual violence victimization among mental health service users: a systematic review and meta-analyses | Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology (springer.com)

Or contact Anjuli at anjuli.1.kaul@kcl.ac.uk  

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

Multiple perpetrator violent events and variation in victims’ needs  

Dr Elouise Davies

As an early career researcher in Criminology, I am interested in violent crime, domestic violence and threats to kill. Specifically, my research has focused on the measurement and outcomes of violence and how the harms of violence differ for different types of victims.  

In Comparing Single Perpetrator and Multiple Perpetrator Violent Events in the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) I look at the complex structure of violent events reported by CSEW participants. My aim was to compare the needs of victims of violence perpetrated by groups, with the needs of victims of violence perpetrated by a single offender.  

Victimisation surveys are the gold standard in measuring crime (Tilley and Tseloni 2016). They supplement police data. While police data can only capture crimes that are reported to the police, the CSEW captures up to 50% more by also including those events not reported to the police (ONS, 2020). We can use this to understand which types of crime and which victims are not appearing in police data.  

My analyses of CSEW data have revealed that victims of multiple perpetrator violent events more often report their experiences to the police than victims of single perpetrator violent events. They were also more likely to receive medical attention and treatment at hospital after the violent incident and were also more likely to have contact with victims’ services.   

These findings highlight how victims of violent events with one perpetrator may well be underrepresented in records drawn from police, health, and specialist services. It is important that research based on such data sources are aware of this issue in coverage.  

Further research is needed to investigate why some victims do not access services and how access to services can be improved for those who are currently underrepresented. 

For further information, please contact Elouise at e.davies4@lancaster.ac.uk

References

Tilley, N., & Tseloni, A. (2016). Choosing and Using Statistical Sources in Criminology: What Can the Crime Survey for England and Wales Tell Us? Legal Information Management, 16(2), 78-90. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1472669616000219   

Office for National Statistics (2020) The nature of violent crime in England and Wales: Year ending March 2020. London: ONS. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/thenatureofviolentcrimeinenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2020   

Photo by pikselstock / Shutterstock.com

A gender analysis of ‘knife crime’

Dr Elizabeth Cook

On Thursday 19th October 2023, Dr Elizabeth Cook was invited to contribute to an event organised by Public Policy Exchange on Combatting Knife Crime in the UK. With contributions from Professor Lawrence Sherman, Professor Kevin Browne, Bruce Houlder CB KC DL, Nathaniel Levy, Dr Sue Roberts, and Sammy Odoi, the event examined current government strategy and policy responses to knife crime. Applying Carol Bacchi’s (1999; 2009) ‘What’s the problem represented to be?’ (WPR) approach, Elizabeth made the case for a gender analysis of ‘knife crime’, a summary of which is provided below.

What’s the problem represented?

Knife crime is a policy priority that ranks consistently high on the government agenda, appearing in key strategic areas such as serious violence, ‘gang’ involvement and exploitation, and children, young people, and vulnerability. Cutting across these strategic areas is a particular attention to tackling county lines and the misuse of drugs, restrictions on weapon-carrying and possession, early intervention and prevention programmes with young people, and community partnership responses and safeguarding.

What are the assumptions underpinning these representations?

There are key assumptions that underpin these representations of knife crime in public policy, each linked to specific ideas about:

  • who exactly is at risk,
  • where is considered to be safe,
  • who is vulnerable to harm,
  • and, on the whole, what forms of violence are deemed to be ‘serious’.

Constructions of knife crime as they currently stand, depict the problem as one committed primarily by and against men, occurring in public spaces, often between young people, and as an issue that is increasingly racialised in media and public discourse. The evidence base for each is not to be ignored and there are key takeaways from each policy approach which contribute one piece of a puzzle.

However, taking a WPR approach, there are questions to be asked: What is left unproblematic and what harms and whose voices are missed as a result?

There are key elements that are omitted from current policy approaches to knife crime and lessons to be learned from the violence against women and girls sector which have been relatively absent so far.

What is left unproblematic? Can the problem be thought about differently?

Various sources of evidence highlight that knives are consistently the most frequent method of killing in the context of intimate partner homicide by men against women. While the proportions fluctuate (e.g., ONS 2023; Femicide Census, 2020; VKPP, 2023), it stands that when women are killed by men, they are most likely killed using a knife. 

What effects are produced by this problem representation?

Considering that up to 1 in 3 victims of homicides using a knife are women, it is problematic that there is so little analysis of sex/gender in policy responses (see, MOPAC 2017, for an exception). This has serious implications for how interventions are identified.

For example, efforts to regulate offensive weapons through legislation hit a wall when it comes to domestic abuse committed within the home. There have been several proposals over the years to either blunt kitchen knives or confiscate particular knives in the possession of known domestic abuse perpetrators – the assumption here being that the removal of the weapon is the removal of risk. However, the fundamental issue in domestic abuse is that anything is a weapon.

These raise questions about what (or who) is considered to be a source of risk and what can be done to reduce it.

How can we disrupt the problem representation?

While public health approaches to violence frequently invoke the need for multi-agency and partnership working, this must also translate to policy and implementation in strategy as well as practice. This means further work to avoid and break down policy siloes and assumptions in problem representations.

See the article, free to access, here:

Cook, E. A., & Walklate, S. (2022). Gendered objects and gendered spaces: The invisibilities of ‘knife’ crime. Current Sociology, 70(1), 61-76. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392120932972

References

Bacchi, C. (1999) Women, Policy and Politics: The construction of policy problems, London: Sage.

Bacchi, C. (2009). Analysing policy: What’s the problem represented to be? Frenchs Forest, NSW: Pearson Australia

Bates, L., Hoeger, K., Nguyen Phan, T.T., Perry, P. and Whitaker, A. (2022) Vulnerability Knowledge and Practice Programme (VKPP) Domestic Homicides and Suspected Victim Suicides 2021-2022: Year 2 Report. Available at: https://www.vkpp.org.uk/assets/Files/Domestic-Homicide-Project-Year-2-Report-December-2022.pdf

HM Government (2018) Serious Violence Strategy. London: HM Government. Available at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5acb21d140f0b64fed0afd55/serious-violence-strategy.pdf

Long, J., Wertans, E., Harper, K., Brennan, D., Harvey, H., Allen, R. and Elliott, K. (2020) UK Femicides 2009-2018. London: Femicide Census. Available at: https://www.femicidecensus.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Femicide-Census-10-year-report.pdf  

MOPAC (2017) The London Knife Crime Strategy. London: Greater London Authority. Available at: https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/mopac_knife_crime_strategy_june_2017.pdf 

ONS (2023) Homicide in England and Wales: year ending March 2022. Available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/homicideinenglandandwales/march2022/pdf

For further information, please contact Lizzie at elizabeth.cook@city.ac.uk