Thank you all for coming once again. We actually didn't mean to be rude, but it's not casual here.
And it's my pleasure to welcome Manuel Eisner, who's come over from Cambridge today to speak to us.
Manuel is the Wolfson professor of criminology at the Institute of Criminology, where he's also the director of the Violence Research Centre.
His research interests include the comparison of violence across society over time,
the dynamics of human development and antisocial behaviour and the prevention of violence, which is what it is about today.
So now I'll sit for about an hour and have about half an hour of questions.
Thank you. So first of all, thanks a lot for inviting me to talk to you.
This is really a fantastic opportunity to share some of my thoughts and ideas with you in the coming hour or so.
I would also like to say that I am particularly grateful to Roger Hertz,
who invited me almost 20 years ago to come here for the very first time when it was just about I just
arrived in the UK and he invited me to give a talk here in the very early days when he saw the title.
He thought, well, I had already talked about what, something roughly similar 20 years ago.
And so the answer is this is not the same paper as the one that I presented 20 years ago.
And it's not the case. It is not the case that I've been working on this for the last 20 years.
But but I should say, looking at the title that what I will be talking about today is,
in a sense, a sequel to a conference that I organised some five years ago,
four and a half years ago in Cambridge in 2014, which was roughly about this topic,
what should we do to reduce levels of violence globally by 50% in 20 years or so?
And the way this was organised together with the World Health Organisation and one of the
things that we did at the beginning of this conference was to show a pound note and to say,
well, if you if we as criminologists would have to put our money on something,
let's assume we are giving some money to spend on reducing levels of violence.
Where would you go? What would we prioritise and what do we think we believe is effective?
And I was just talking to a criminologist that I have a question here, which is, are there any astrophysicists who know, okay,
this is this was just this was this is this is not clear why I was I was asking the question my daughter's part of this studying astrophysics here,
but she's not here. But she said she would ask some students whether they would be interested in coming to my talk.
So I was just curious. I was just curious whether anybody had found a way to come here.
So so so here is the background of this research question.
And this is also, by the way, why we organised this conference in 2014.
In 2012, there was this big summit, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio,
which was designed to develop what would be would become known as the Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs.
These Sustainable Development Goals are following up on the Millennium Development Goals, which were introduced in 2000.
There were eight Millennium Development Goals, and the basic idea was to focus attention on just some big overarching goals that would
be relevant for everybody on this globe and that we should work towards achieving.
And so after this have been quite successful or perceived to be quite successful,
in June 2012, there was this next summit that was to develop the next round of goals.
So you can see here, like with all things on earth, there is inflation.
Also with goals. They started with eight goals and for the next period it turned into 17 goals
developed after an extensive consultation process and then adopted in September 2015.
Now, why is this relevant for criminology? You know, probably most of you now think about climate change, hunger, health and so on.
Well, it is relevant for criminology because actually the Sustainable Development Goals
have done something quite revolutionary for the first time ever in human history.
There is somebody saying, well, we should actually try to reduce levels of violence at a global level.
So here are the 17 Sustainable Development Goals and poverty no hunger, good health and so on and so forth, but hidden in these goals.
So these these overarching goals and our targets and indicators, I just want to briefly show you how this functions.
There are a number of goals that are very specifically about reducing violence.
Here are the goals, the targets.
So, for instance, among quality. Education. There is a target that says that governments and non-government organisations across the world should try
to create a safe environment for children to have a safe learning environment under gender equality.
There is this target to eliminate all forms of violence against all women and girls in public and private spheres.
Now, just for a second, probably everybody's reaction is, well, not to eliminate all forms of violence in the next 15 or 20 years.
Now, although this language is aspirational, it's very relevant, and it has led to a number of initiatives that are really very, very important.
Then there is Goal 16, Peace and Justice, which actually I tend to call the criminology goal.
You may not have known so far, but in the Sustainable Development Goals there is one goal that is almost entirely relevant to criminology.
And whenever I say this, I also add that I'm quite disappointed overall, and maybe I'm talking to not to the right audience here,
that criminology as a discipline has not really picked up on this fact.
You know, there is something about justice.
There is something about corruption, and there is that there is a number of goals related to violence through 16.1,
significantly reduce all forms of violence and debt related death rates.
16 points to ending abuse, exploitation, trafficking of all forms of violence, of torture against children.
Now, what has happened over the last few years is that these targets have been turned into indicators,
measurable indicators, with the idea of actually being able to track progress.
I just want to show you here to just just to indicate just so that you get an idea and they are not perfect.
But what they do is to create a an environment, a push for governments to actually try to measure these things and international organisation.
So for instance,
measuring the percentage of children who have experienced physical punishment or psychological aggression by caregivers in the past month.
Or, for instance, the percentage of young women that men aged 18 to 29 years who experienced sexual violence.
So this is just to show you how how up the United Nations, UNODC,
UNICEF are trying to develop measurable indicators that track progress along these goals.
So I want to show you something about the size of the problem at a global level so that you get an idea.
We'll be starting, I should say here, that all these data estimates,
we don't really exactly know where our starting point is, but this just gives you a rough idea of where we are coming from.
Currently, the estimate for the homicide or the number of homicides worldwide is about 430,000.
Probably just one important thing here.
If you think about homicides, they account for vastly larger number of violent deaths than all wars taken together.
And that's despite despite four instances of war in Syria.
They account for a much larger number of violent deaths than armed conflict.
Roughly 30% of women aged 15 and over have experienced one at least once in a lifetime physical and sexual intimate partner violence and roughly 54%.
That comes out of a very recent systematic review of roughly 54% of children under age 18 have experienced violence in the past year.
It sometimes helps to translate this into absolute numbers.
That's 800 million women and the roughly 1 billion children who have experienced violence just in the last year.
One of the reasons why this is relevant for a number of all the targets is that victimisation has a number of negative consequences.
And I just want to briefly show you another overview of some of the consequences of violence victimisation.
They relate to internalising symptoms. They relate to a number of physical health symptoms, substance use and so on and so forth.
This is just to show that violence has a number of costs that go far beyond just the mere kind of injury that's caused by the victimisation.
Some people have tried to come up with estimates of the economic costs of violence, and I'm not sure whether I trust this data.
It's not because the estimates are coming from Oxford, but it's but but but there is you know,
it's just hugely difficult to really realistically estimate these numbers.
But those estimates that are floating around are very, very large.
So so here are just a few figures that suggest that may be something between one
and four or 5% of GDP are the total economic costs of interpersonal violence.
Here. You can see that in comparison to collective violence, that's vastly larger and it's roughly equivalent.
So to the total GDP of the United Kingdom.
These costs are not equally distributed across the world.
And I think I just want to show you a few slides on the regional distribution of these costs.
One of the ways to do this is to show you a map of the world by the number of homicides.
And when you look at the map of the world by the number of homicides, you will see that Latin America is huge.
About 45% of all murder cases are concentrated in just about ten countries in the world.
And Central America and the north of Latin America is very big and Africa is very big while Europe here we have the UK is very small.
I want to show you just to get you thinking a comparison to where the knowledge is worldwide.
So I'll show you the next map on the number of academic papers produced across the world.
This is what the world looks like if you look at it in terms of economic output.
And just this is not specifically criminology and things are shifting gradually.
But I just want to show this to you, because what it alerts us to is that the knowledge is not where the problem lies.
And that does apply to the entire debate around violence and violence prevention.
I just show additionally this slide so that just to bring down the argument that
this this is just about the argument that this is not just limited to homicide.
These are regional differences in sexual abuse cases, according to a recent review by Sivakumar and others from the No Violence Initiative.
And what it shows you is, broadly speaking, irrespective of what you're looking at,
whether you're looking at intimate partner violence or bullying or sexual violence,
low and middle income countries tend to be higher, and we in industrial societies tend to be lowest.
Overall, there are exceptions that are different patterns, but overall that's the route, broadly the pattern.
So so I'm coming back now to the Sustainable Development Goals.
What have we achieved? What have these goals done and where are we going?
I think over the last decade or so, well, it maybe over the last five years,
there's been quite a lot of progress towards working towards these sustainably, towards achieving these sustainable development goals.
And I think it's important to recognise these this progress.
There's been a growth in available data. This is, for one, just a very important, impressive progress.
You know, there are no violence against children surveys in about 20 countries.
The demographic and health service in low and middle income countries provide information now on female
victimisation of intimate partner violence for about 40 or 50 countries and so on and so forth.
There are more evaluation studies conducted outside Europe and the United States.
When I looked at this first for the first time about five or six years ago,
roughly 97% of all evaluation studies have been conducted in the United States or in Europe.
There is now a growing number of studies that are conducted in.
Low and middle in various low middle income countries, partly because some major philanthropic organisations are putting their resources behind this.
There is a development of global information systems. The info, if you're interested,
is something developed by the World Health Organisation as quite impressive as a resource because you get so excited to interrupt the.
Does anyone here on a bicycle which is attached to the railings at the front?
If so, it won't be needed. They will have to remove it because it's causing an obstacle.
Okay. Thank you. Sorry, sir. I just moved this and I keep that.
No, I think this is the right thing for. Deviant acts, for criminology.
Yes. There is an increasing diffusion of a public health approach to addressing violence.
So kind of like not just focusing on criminal justice approaches.
Not just thinking about in-group increasing punitive ness, but thinking about public health approaches to addressing the problems related to violence.
And there is global monitoring of violence prevention efforts.
For instance, Alex Bouchard and Chris McNeil published a first global status report on violence prevention in 2014.
The next one is going to come out in the next few months, which will also track progress in what has been done in roughly 140 countries.
Again, the data may not be perfect, but what they do and that's, by the way, inherited from the success of traffic accident prevention,
that making countries just report on what they're doing, makes them do things.
You know, it's just just a public visibility of what is happening has a kind of like creates a moral climate whereby countries tend to do more.
So there is a global, quote, toolbox of prevention strategies.
I just want to show you one example of what is being done.
And so this is something that I'm working with quite a lot.
It's called Inspire, which is one of these acronyms that people have to invent all the time to make people make others interested.
Inspire was developed by W.H.O. and the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention with an involvement of a number of other organisations.
And what it does is to present a kind of like it's a recipe book.
It's interesting. I highly recommend to actually take a serious look at it.
It's a recipe book. It has not a technical report that talks about how to implement these programs to help with the implementation program.
And it also provides recommendations on monitoring and evaluation.
One of the the assumptions that this Inspire framework makes,
and that's a critical assumption I'll come back to this is the assumption that we know enough about the causes of violence,
that we can actually do the right thing without having to replicate all kinds of risk factors, studies in different countries.
That's an interesting assumption, and that would be interesting to talk about whether that's effectively true.
And I'm asking myself, I'm split on that.
I want to just go through these seven strategies just with one example for each strategy so that you can see what they're trying to do.
For instance, they say under I implement laws that ban corporal punishment,
implement education and community mobilisation programs against different types of violence, for instance,
against female genital mutilation and some of changing norms and values in the society
as one important pillar that can create a moral climate that's more averse to violence,
creating safe environments. For instance, target hotspots and create safe built environments.
Parent and caregiver support. Provide power and training programs in different societies, income and economic strengthening.
So the argument is that there is sufficient evidence to argue that violence is creative.
What violence can be prevented can be reduced by income and economic strengthening programs.
So implement cash transfer programs, responsive supportive services,
improved child protection services, and finally implement life and social skills training.
So that's for us to speak to this package that W.H.O. has put together.
And I think one of the big questions here is and by the way,
I'm not arguing against the Inspire framework, but one of the questions is, well, is this the right?
Thing to do. Is this where we should put our money to actually achieve large scale population wide reductions in
violence and that just want to follow this line and ask a few questions about what else we need.
Then just implementing the Inspire framework, which I think is interesting.
I find it useful. I will come back to this again, but I don't think it's everything that we need.
So now I'm going back to what Roger was talking about, long term, big trends.
I think we need to better understand what causes what drives macro level trends and violence.
And I just want to explain here that this is not the same thing as understanding why
one individual or a group of individuals or a classroom becomes more or less violent.
This is a different thing. And I just want to explain very briefly why.
So here is a number of programs. This is all these programs that's kind of like inherited from this Inspire framework.
That's the kind of things that are in our toolbox.
And the question is, should we think about why does system change are something that is really important to achieve these goals?
Now, the way I want to I want to show you here one thing. It's just one example of how to think about this.
This is the my human society's homicide scale.
I just want to explain to you, those of you who are not that familiar with statistics of this scale is a logarithmic scale.
So for every Y climb, it multiplies the homicide rate by a factor of ten.
And so I can line up all the human societies,
all the countries on a vertical axis that just lines up all 198 countries for which for which the estimates are on this vertical axis.
This is the current global average, roughly 6.4 per 100,000, roughly 8 million deaths since 2000.
And you can also see, by the way, that is this here.
Here are a number of countries just so that you get an impression.
Singapore is at the very bottom with a homicide rate of about 0.2 per 100,000 Honduras here.
But these are data for about 2005 is at the top with almost 100, which is important.
So homicide across the world varies by factor of about 1 to 500.
That's at the country level. If you break this down at the neighbourhood level, it's 1 to 1000 or 1 to 2000.
Huge differences across the world. So here in the Middle East of the United States.
And no, that's just what I was just saying.
And I just want to do one thing. I want to compare two countries that are currently roughly at the polar opposites of this scale.
This time here is Singapore. And this one up here is Jamaica.
Now, I'm going to do some historical wizardry and I'll show you the trends in homicide rates in these two countries.
I'll start with with Singapore. Now, the interesting thing is, I mean, you all know that Singapore now has this reputation of being this paradise.
You know, Disneyland with the death penalty is one of the labels that Singapore has.
But it was it had a reputation for being a very violent society.
You can see here, for instance, around the 1920s and then the late 19th century,
it was well known for being having a lot of organised crime, a lot of drug use problems and so on and so forth.
Now let's compare this to Jamaica.
Now, the interesting, by the way, for both countries, we have reasonably defensible data because the colonial authorities,
one of the things they wanted to do is to just count whatever it was they could count.
And one of the things that they did produce for this flew books and they exist for both countries.
Now, one of the most astonishing things about this is until independence 1960, the two countries have almost identical homicide rates.
By the way.
Also, these two countries have almost identical GDP per capita in ninth in the late 1950s, they've almost identical literacy rates of roughly 70%.
And they have a number of other things.
They have also very similar levels of, for instance, informal housing.
Both Singapore and Jamaica had a large number of informal settlements, and so they were very, very similar in very many respects.
And then they go into opposite directions.
And so I'm showing this to you because I think, well, if you want to achieve population wide reductions in violence, we don't have to like Singapore.
I'm not saying that you have to like Singapore,
but understanding what has been happening in these two societies is relevant for making reasonably good recommendations.
Now I just want to show you a few ideas about what may have been relevant in Singapore.
It's been a lot of effort in control of corruption. That was one of the.
Lee Kuan Yew, the first president of of of Singapore.
One of the very first things that he was really keen on was control, corruption.
Create a civil service that was not corrupt, that was meritocratic, and that was well trained and was well paid.
Invest in a lot of investment into education and low segregation and Singapore has almost no segregation.
I do not think personally, but interestingly, Singaporeans themselves disagree with me.
The death penalty probably did not really play an important role in this whole story, but that's that would be another interesting story to tell.
Jamaica goes a different pathway.
One of the things that already started in the 1940s and then an increase around independence is client holistic, violent politics.
So part is that the high votes are try to get their own members into the states or state state system and fight for control over power using violence.
And that leads to distrust at violent police. Just one number here.
I mean, just bear in mind, you know, Jamaica is about a third of the size of London.
And just the number of people killed by the police is around 200 to 300 per year.
That's just a number of people killed by the police in Singapore over the last 20 years.
They count a total of ten killings committed by the police.
And so this is roughly at variance by 1 to 1000 between these two countries.
So what are the research implications? The many I think we need.
So I'll just boil this down in one sentence. I think we need to learn more about what drives these changes, these trends in violence threats.
I'm not saying we are particularly good at it.
We're usually surprised when trends change in the UK. We have to tackle this problem for 20 years.
It was quite easy to predict what was going to happen. The trend was going down that we were all saying, well, it's going down.
Steven Pinker wrote a book that violence is going down and all of a sudden it starts going up again and nobody was really, really understands why.
All of a sudden this change in the trend happens. But maybe some of you do.
So I think we need to improve methodology. We need to better understand what drives these large scale trends.
Secondly, I think we need to develop a better understanding of universal causal mechanisms,
so move beyond a number of programmes and really try to do good basic science.
I think that's the basic argument here and basic science that can bridge the gap between macro and micro level.
And I just want to talk about one mechanism that I am getting increasingly interested in and I find quite interesting,
led to this revenge mechanism where I tend to think that in human brains,
especially male human brains, there is a something that is a revenge mechanism that that's involved,
that that produces violence and then environmental triggers that make this revenge mechanism happen or not.
The revenge mechanism is something very useful in human societies for a number of reasons.
It deters aggressors from acts of violence. It prevents attackers from attacking again, and it prevents egoistic actors from rewriting.
And there is a number of consistent theories that predict that such a revenge mechanism should exist.
I just want to show you one thing that links the victimisation of relating to this revenge mechanism.
We've just submitted a paper on this, which you can actually already read about the effects of violent victimisation on violence fantasies in Zurich,
which is, by the way, I come from 2 to 3 is reasonably peaceful society reasonably peaceful.
So I've been running along a channel study.
We've been running this for 15 years now, and at age 17 we asked the young people whether they fantasise about killing off this map.
Now, one of the outcomes of this is that if these young men and women all acted on their fantasies,
Switzerland would be wiped out in about three and a half months.
Now, that leads to the question why does the human brain, especially the adolescent human brain, produce so many violent fantasies?
Now, one of the mechanisms, I think, that plays a role there are the mechanisms is that victimisation and that's the revenge mechanism.
You being victimised somebody to treat you badly, somebody bullies you, somebody assaults you.
That this makes you think this makes you wish to payback, to retaliate.
And that's something, by the way, that's something different from death just getting angry.
So here is the number of violent fantasies that young men have as a function of the number of victimisation.
And this is, by the way, the same thing for for for females.
So for both females and males, the number of violent fantasies goes up as they are more likely to be victimised, less so for girls than for men.
So what is the associated macro mechanism? I do not have enough time really to talk about this in much detail,
but I want to show you just two slides that actually take us back to my talk 16 years ago.
But this is just one photo. So one of the things that I've been interested in for quite a long time is this big pattern, long term homicide trends.
And again, you know, trying to understand why what is happening here. This is homicide rates per 100,000 over the last 800 years.
And what you should be able to see here, as I display these figures for an increasing number of countries,
is that homicide rates across Europe have been consistently going down from roughly 1400 to about 2000.
It's one of the longest social science trends and most consistent social science trends that I think we find anywhere with some regional variation.
The south of Europe starts later than the north of Europe.
And one of the things that I'm interested in is why this decline happens.
And one of the hypotheses by Norbert Elias is that it happened because the increase in control over
elite violence led to an increase in control over vengeance as a mechanism of solving conflict.
So essentially, if you say, you know, the good news is for those of us who believe in the rule of law,
but as a rule of law, some kind of like established state starts to function.
Private revenge becomes replaced by a number of push and pull factors.
And so to test this, I got my children to do some slave work for me.
And so we started coding all ten killed killings.
This started in a gloomy Sunday morning when we were wondering, well, how many British kings have been killed?
And so this then led us to kind of like do this a little bit.
And we ended up coding roughly 1700 monarchs in Europe.
Why do it? Well, here is the thing. I mean, with this 1700 monarchs, if you are looking at a regular population, this is a good quiz quiz question.
What is the most dangerous occupation on earth? And the answer to this question is being a monarch.
And I just want to show you. Well, just briefly, 1700 people, if you monitor a village of 1700 people for an entire generation in modern Britain,
how many people would you expect to die from violence?
Well, the answer is about half a person. Now, fortunately for us, monarchs were much more productive field.
We ended up having 218 monarchs out of these, 1600 ended up being murdered.
And so if you look at this, over time, the frequency of killing monarchs became much, much lower over a long period of time.
That's actually 1200 years. And one of the reasons behind this is that transition,
the transition of power from one generation to the other became much more rule bound, much more regularised.
It became much more difficult to kill your brother, to kill somebody from a different family, and then accede to power.
And so there is an interesting I just want to show this to you.
This is the red line. Here is the trend in homicide rates.
And the blue line is the trend in regicide.
And what you should be able to see here is that the decline in regicide, the decline in elite violence proceeded in time.
The decline in homicide rates. So your argument here and again, you try to remember this inspire framework,
the argument here is that we need to think about these macro structures, you know, state building structures.
What is the state about and what makes it a good state, a state where people willingly do not take private revenge, but really.
Sept. State conflict resolution mechanisms to find ways of resolving conflict.
I think that's the basic argument here and so so the argument is this is not included
in this final framework but is something important that one needs to think about.
A third proposal that I think we need to I believe we need to think more about is that we need to bridge the gap between law enforcement,
criminal justice and public health systems.
Now, I'm usually these days talking more to the public people in public health than in the law enforcement sector.
I'm kind of like a deviant criminologist, if you will.
But I just want to emphasise that very often in the public health sector, people just do not like the police and they don't like prisons.
I think criminologists generally don't like the police and the prisons either.
But this is this is a different I think the problem here is and that leads me
back to the problem of of revenge in the sense that in the public health sector,
there is a belief that the criminal justice system, including police, including prisons, are part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
And that leads to a complete, almost complete, for instance,
rejection of interagency collaboration between criminal justice actors and public health actors.
And I go to public health conferences. There is not a single person for criminology there.
When I go to criminology conferences, there is almost never an actor from the public health sector there.
And so I think we need to bridge this gap between these two ways of thinking about why is this important?
Here I am just bringing up a few arguments about why the criminal justice sector is so.
This slide is actually made for public health people to understand why the criminal justice sector is important.
I just want to come back to the prevention topic with this.
The numbering is entirely wrong with this second point one, which is about this problem with punishment.
But I sometimes want to try to explain. I showed you before that Honduras and El Salvador have some of the highest homicide rates in the world.
And sometimes when I go to public health sector seminars, I ask, well, what do you think?
If somebody commits a homicide in Honduras, what is the average prison length that you have to expect for killing somebody or what should it be?
The answer to the ASBOs prison length is about four months. Why is it an average of four months?
Because the impunity rate is about 96%. And so if you think about this in terms of the value of life, that's relatively low.
And the question is, does this partly contribute to the problem?
And so so I guess the argument here is where the state fails to provide protection,
which the victims will seek the help of others, for example, gangs.
And there is a number of ideas about how to improve collaboration between the public health sector and the criminal justice sector.
Jonathan Sheppard from Cardiff University is one of the leading figures to kind of try to
push this agenda of better collaboration between public health and criminal justice sector.
And I just want to show you very briefly his Cardiff data sharing model, which probably many of you are familiar with.
Are you okay? So some nodding, some not nodding.
So the Cardiff data sharing model is a very, very simple model it trusts as well.
Many of the victims of violence never show up in the police data.
They don't go to the police, they go to hospital because they're injured, but they are not visible to the police state.
And so what they what he's suggesting is more collaboration between the public health sector,
between hospitals and the criminal justice sector to get better data that can drive better, more targeted interventions.
My first proposal is to highlight limitations of what we understand when we make recommendations to policy makers.
This goes back to my own experiences with having run some randomised controlled trials and I don't know what I do wrong.
Every one of my randomised controlled trials always ends up having little findings and then I'm kind of confronted with this problem.
How do you communicate this problem? And so this is about trying to make a moral argument, communicating where we have a limitation in our knowledge.
And here is the example of early prevention. Early prevention, everybody loss it.
Don't just start early in the first two years of life and here are just a few examples.
Use the Allen report early. If you remember the original report, that was this report with the power supply chain,
the small brain and the small brain was kind of like this was the message exposed to early, you know, neglect and maltreatment.
And the brain doesn't develop properly and the rest are held separate and early prevention will help reducing crime and so on.
How solid is the evidence? Well, I actually think it's not that solid at all.
And we've run into a number of kind of like difficult problems.
Well, some childhood risk factors are not really causes, but they're kind of like symptoms of an underlying propensity, you know,
so so some childhood things like hyperactivity,
typical temperament can just be symptoms of an underlying problem that just changes the way it looks as children become older.
Some risk factors that we think are true.
Early childhood risk factors may just be markers of a causal mechanism that we don't understand.
If we say, well, I don't know, email is risk factor well may and is just a placeholder for something,
but we don't really understand what is going on there.
If we say poverty is a risk factor, what is really going on there behind this kind of like label that we're using?
Some things that we believe are risk factors may actually be effects of child behaviour.
And finally, for almost all these putative childhood risk factors,
we don't really know which ones are causal and malleable and we don't know whether they replicate.
I want to show you one study that was involved in with Joe Murray, who is now in Interlochen in Brazil, where we looked.
We tried to do a systematic review of all longitudinal studies that we could
find on the effects of childhood risk factors on later aggressive behaviour.
And the one thing that I just couldn't believe is how inconsistent the findings are.
And I just wanted to show you some of the some of the unexpected findings.
Yeah. Many of the assumed early childhood risk factors where you would think, well, this is clearly established.
Everybody knows that this is the case. We're just not replicated in some of these studies.
And we don't understand why this is happening. Why does exposure to prenatal and postnatal malnutrition,
tobacco and alcohol consume during pregnancy, birth complications, brain injury, exposure to toxins?
They're all not really predictive of behaviour problems later on.
This is not an argument about just to make this clear, another argument that we should do something about all these problems.
But I'm just arguing the empirical evidence is not as clear cut as sometimes public policy documents make us believe.
Yes. And this was another thing. Many assumed social deprivation indicators like poor education achievement, large family size,
low maternal education, for reasons that we don't really understand in these big longitudinal studies,
just didn't work as neatly as many of us in the room will probably believe they do, and we don't really understand why.
And so the only argument here is that really developmental prevention is popular.
Many people want to invest in this.
I am fully in support of investing in this, but there is many developmental mechanisms that we don't really understand.
Most longitudinal studies have been conducted in so-called weird countries in West and high income countries.
We are generalising to low income complex to other cultures that function in a very different way.
And we don't really know whether the evidence is strong enough to that to make sure that we are doing the right kind of thing.
And that leads me if I have another 10 minutes or so. Yeah.
Okay. That leads me to talking the last bit of this talk to talk a little bit about a project
that I'm currently involved in and very busy with and quite enthusiastic about.
So that links to this entire discussion.
It was developed at least I started thinking about this in 2014 as a result of this conference, and I'm still interested in making this work.
So this is kind of like looking out into the future. We call it Evidence for Better Lives.
The subtitle is A Global Cohort Study to Tackle Violence Against Children.
And I just want to briefly show you what this study is all about.
Evidence for Better Lives has three main components.
So what we want to do and that links to what I was just saying before.
With this slides, we want to contribute to better knowledge about causal mechanisms associated with the effects of violence against children,
but also the mechanisms that are associated with poor child outcomes in terms of psychosocial and actually physical health.
So that we can better support psychosocial development from the beginning of life.
I should say here that I'm actually of the view with this perspective that we shouldn't think too narrowly about criminology in this context at all.
You will see in a minute that I'm actually in the study, the only criminologist and all others are coming from other disciplines.
And I think we need to keep engaging in this interdisciplinary discourse discourse.
We want to have policy impact from the beginning.
So we're working with eight cities and we want to make sure that the knowledge that we generate in this study
will be disseminated and influence national and international violence reduction policies and practices.
And finally, we believe that relates to the map that I showed you with the gaps between where the problem lies and where the where the knowledge is.
We want to contribute to capacity building and effectively work with partners in low and middle income
countries to strengthen the ability to better understand what the problems are and how to better address them.
The size of the study. So here are the sides of the study.
We spent about a year identifying the studies and the study partners.
I just want to briefly go through them.
So I should say here first, we were initially thinking when we started with this study to focus on big cities, Mexico City, Karachi,
and but increasingly, it became clear that in these very big global cities, it's just almost impossible to do a longitudinal study.
And we also thought that and that was partly influenced by what I learned working with the municipality in Zurich,
that a medium sized city in the medium sized city,
the chances of actually engaging policymakers in decision making in exchange with academics are much bigger than in large in large cities.
So we are focusing on medium sized cities. So the places are the places are the finger is still best.
Big places are King's school in Jamaica with a very high homicide rate, Koforidua,
which is a little bit about 80 kilometres north of Accra in Ghana, Stellenbosch, slightly north of Cape Town in South Africa.
Cluj-napoca, which is the second largest city in Romania, parallel column, which is a satellite city outside Islamabad in Pakistan.
There are Goma, which is outside Colombo, but also almost a suburb of of Colombo,
which is in the middle of Vietnam and Valenzuela City, which is a city outside Manilla.
And so what we are trying to do is to learn from these cities and from doing good research about what drives China's development.
What obviously is the are the effects of exposure to violence.
Here is one just one thing that I would like to mention here.
I was saying at some stage that we need to better overcome the gap between macro and micro level criminology.
What is are the big fact contextual factors and what are the micro level factors?
Most longitudinal studies can't do this because most almost all I think all longitudinal
studies are really just looking at children growing up within one society.
So you have all the things that sociologists are interested in.
How does social context vary?
Almost constant neighbourhood level variation, but you do not really have macro level, societal cultural context variation.
Now this would be different if we can pull this off. We have a lot more variation at the macro level that we can then combine with an
understanding of what are the micro-level mechanisms that are happening here.
Here is just a list of just to show you how much variation we have across the sides
on a number of important issues and the number of important contextual factors.
You see, the homicide rates are much different across these sides.
You can also see that levels of social inequality are hugely different between these sites.
And gender inequality varies quite a lot between Pakistan with the highest level of gender
inequality and Romania in this sample said probably it's actually surprisingly Vietnam.
Vietnam with the lowest level of gender inequality.
So I could go on. I mean, just to give you one other example of how much variation we will have, we have variation between some societies,
some neighbourhoods where almost every child will grow up in a extended family
with the father and mother and other children being in the same family too,
for all the neighbourhoods, other areas within the city where the biological father being present is the exception rather than the rule.
It's something that just doesn't usually happen.
And so in terms of family structures, in terms of inequality, there will be huge variation between these sites.
This is the consortium, a group of people led by left led by a number of people in Cambridge.
But I think the important thing here is that what we try to do is to put together
a team of researchers that come from many different disciplines public health,
psychology, psychiatry, paediatrics, health economics and so on, and including criminology.
Just a few basic ideas of how we plan.
We want to go to find the money, and even then we're going to find the money.
So for the main study. But I just want to show you what the basic idea would be.
It would be the idea to have the first Secretary Baker.
It's a big idea. 12,000 children born in the year 2020 in many different places across the world.
And what happens to these children? The first criminologist up with an interesting thing to know, actually,
what is it in the lives of 12,000 children going to very different societies, very different contexts.
And if we can follow them until age ten or 15 or 20.
How well are we doing in understanding who is going into getting into trouble and who isn't?
What can we do about it? How can do something about it?
There is a number of other interesting things that we're trying to do. I'm not going to go into the details.
I just want to mention one thing, because I was just talking about the fathers.
Social studies are just interviewing mothers.
The reason one of the main reasons is it's much easier. Fathers are just a nuisance when it comes to long term studies about the child.
The. You don't want to participate organisers. They are actually they are busy.
They're doing things. And so one of the things that we want to do and we think this is from development of criminology really, really important,
is to better understand what the fathers are doing and what is happening to them and how we need to think about fathers in terms of prevention.
We are currently working on the foundation study,
so we are currently at the stage of a pilot study where we test just about everything that we can test with a sample of 150 pregnant women for a site.
We will be going into the field in January. So it's a hectic time.
It's very hectic times. So so what we've found over the last few months is to finally get ethics approval in ten different sites.
It was about translating the questionnaires into 11 different languages and organising sampling strategies and so on.
And next week, I will be going to a child protection summit in Bermuda,
where we bring together the mayors from each city in Manilla doing what we call the policy summit.
It's not going to be a fix, I don't think hundreds of people, but it's just about trying to bring together policy makers.
Tell me about them, about the study and involving them in the process of thinking about policy impact and having them on board at an early stage.
Here is just what thematic focus of this first study that I want to emphasise or just to highlight here,
because it's the one thing that is going to be the focus of the pilot study.
We're interested in the link between the maternal exposure to.
Violence during pregnancy and child outcomes.
This is important because in some societies we both are included in this study.
We know that quite a substantial proportion of pregnant women are exposed to intimate partner violence.
And the question is, well, does this have an effect not just on the mother's well-being, but also on the well-being of the child?
Measurable at a six months has been many studies have been conducted that actually demonstrate that there is such a correlation.
But one of the things that is not really well understood is what the mediating pathways are that link maternal exposure to violence, to the effect.
And I'm just linking a few things here. Maternal exposure to intimate partner violence could lead to higher physiological stress,
and that in turn could have an impact on the environment in which the foetus grows up.
And that in turn could have an impact on child development, but it could also, for instance, have an effect on poor nutrition.
It could have an effect on pre and perinatal depression.
And that in turn could be the causal mechanism that leads to the poor child outcomes.
Now, you might think, well, we don't really have to understand these mechanisms because everybody in the
room will agree that we should try to reduce intimate partner violence anyways.
But I think, one, unless we assume that anytime soon we can eliminate intimate partner violence,
it's important to understand what the causal mechanism is,
what the transmission mechanism is, so that we can address the right kind of processes that may be involved in interrupting this this link.
So this is the last slide. All this last slide.
I just want to show you what we were trying to achieve. So we want to become the first global first court study on child psychosocial health.
It's not going to be a pure criminological study.
It's going to be across boundaries, broadly focussed on child psychosocial health in low and middle income countries.
We want to link it to a policy impact strategy and the policy impact strategy will be focussed on exposure to violence.
But it also becomes increasingly clear to us that if you want to engage in reducing violence against children,
you have to engage in a number of other public health topics.
So again, it's not just about reducing crime or violence.
There are many other goals involved.
We want to integrate the capacity building approach that promotes early career scholars and South-South collaboration,
which is quite exciting and well,
one of the things that are just interesting, I like if you're interested,
I'm happy to talk about to develop an organisation structure that actually makes this function.
If you think about the personalities of academics, I know that you're all exceptional,
but generally speaking, all the academics are not quite easy to work with.
And so making sure that you have a system in place where there is a good chance that people will be working together for many, many years to come.
And it's quite a challenge and we want to see whether we can create this organisational structure.
So the pilot study is also kind of like almost a psychological experiment.
Is it possible to keep roughly a third well of roughly 20 academics in one room for
18 months working together on a weekly basis and see whether that actually works?
So so that's what I'm cosy up to and sometimes I hope the project is not going to go any further.
And I think. I think that extremely wide ranging talk we now have at the time talk market questions and we like to start.
Yeah. So it's a sign you of a moderate.
So. First part of the show. So, you know, a well-researched and plausible explanation for violence is you're exposed to violence,
you're subject to violence, and you therefore resort to violence.
So, you know, you could observe that in the fifties and sixties of Britain, corporal punishment was a constant feature of schools,
the criminal justice system, corporal punishment in prisons, and I'm guessing reliable data on this.
But punishing children in public was not deemed to be particularly offensive.
And, you know, if you whack a kid in a supermarket now.
Of course. Right. So there's been a huge shift in attitudes towards getting children, whether it's disciplinary or other reasons.
And, of course, it's good for the schools. It's gone from the prison system.
But at the same time, teenage violence has skyrocketed.
So all these sort of other anomalies in the field.
I wondered what you thought about that. Um, so that's sort of that's a depressing finding because, you know,
there was an intervention stopped corporal punishment and it didn't have the payoff that people had hoped it would, if I'm correct.
I mean, that my point is that. Next.
I'm just trying to think about a clever answer to your question.
Overall, first of all, I think your what you're saying is exactly true.
We don't know was all these big hopes about changing parity and consequence,
changing populations and the evidence that this has worked in the way we thought this
would work and especially corporal punishment has not really turned out to work well.
And so I think, again, while we have I, I just I think it reinforces the idea that while in a small scale experiment,
we often find that improving parenting skills is associated with short term use and short term gains in child social skills.
At the macro level, the evidence for a systematic,
consistent link between changes in parenting and changes in crime levels is much less convincing, and we don't really understand what is going on.
So this is not intelligence. So it's just saying, I think you're pointing out the right kind of problems and it's in line with what I'm saying.
We need to understand these big trends if we are to do the right thing, that actually reduces levels of violence.
Yeah. This is more of an offer than anything.
So I'm the police commander in writing,
and I am a member of the Global Law Enforcement and Public Health Association and the first international conference as an editor.
And here I sit on about three different public health boards around law
enforcement and public health in collaboration and along with the U.S. economy.
So the bare bones in a place of public health, I think there's quite a lot going on there.
I think it's going to be discussed going to Cape Town next week to talk to the Western Cape government,
but the law enforcement and public health approach to reducing violence.
So if you're not aware of all of that, maybe you're not very happy.
It I wasn't aware of your recruit. I've just come back from Berlin, where we have the Global Violence Prevention Alliance meeting we are at,
which is or not the W.H.O., but we've been trying for quite a while to save more people from the law enforcement side.
And there was colleagues from the last that were there talking about the Glasgow model.
That is some actually something that we have been trying to bring about more.
And so I thought it would be fantastic to do a lot of work in Nairobi, tell you what's going on.
And also on the cost of punishment being decriminalised in Scotland,
we haven't seen the rise in the trials that are in England where it's not criminalised.
So there's maybe a bit of hope, you know, of the discourse.
What does our discourse look like? That might be signs of policy, but it's not criminal and it isn't Scotland.
You might see the same issues as maybe something else. Chelsea, hello.
Thank you so much for your time. I learned quite a lot. So my question is, I suppose a bit of a challenge.
One, two points that you made early in your presentation.
The first one was when you showed us the map of the essentially the just position between the problem and the knowledge.
So I want to push back once again on one point,
and it's the publishing of academic papers as evidence of knowledge on violence and it's instances of interpersonal violence.
And to that point, the decline of interpersonal violence and murder rates in Western Europe,
kind of juxtaposed with the places in the world where there is exceptional violence.
And I think there's a huge missing causal mechanism of colonialism and the the relationship between the
Western high income countries that we talked about and the places where there is so much violence.
In a lot of ways, the moving of that violence from the Western countries into other countries where the mechanisms,
whether economic, political, socio political, um,
their motivations for actors and militaries from those Western high income countries too,
that facilitate and are involved in instances of violence in those other areas in the world,
in Africa and Latin America and in Asia and the Middle East.
Yes, it just feels like there's a there's a big gap missing and is particularly was jarring with then just position of where the violence is.
And I think there is a missing relationship between the violence.
That's evidence that's evident that we see in those places.
Yes. I think first of all, I think you're absolutely right that in this bigger picture of where the violence is and I'm trying to answer the question,
well, why is it where it is? The question of colonial heritage must play an important part.
I do not think it's the only answer, but I think it's an important part of trying to better understand why we have this distribution.
I am also saying that I don't think it's the only topic that we need to think about.
For one, and I think I tried to show this to you with the comparison between Singapore and Jamaica.
There are countries that are similar in terms of their they're not identical, but they're similar in terms of their colonial heritage.
But they've come in very different parts.
There are other countries, like many countries in Latin America, that haven't been colonial societies for the last 200 years.
And still there have actually, for many a long period after that, have been colonial societies.
There was nothing that made them particularly bad.
Uruguay, Argentina. Actually, Venezuela was not known to be particularly violent until relatively recently.
So I think looking at colonialism is important, but I don't think it's the only mechanism that we should be looking at.
Now, in terms of I to give you the world in a second.
I think in terms of the second argument is this juxtaposition of where the problem is and where the knowledge is.
This is a well, let me just explain where I'm coming from.
I think I tend to be in terms of the potential for criminology to contribute to solutions, not just criminology, also public health.
I'm an optimist.
I actually do think that knowledge can make a difference about actually understanding what causes social problems may help to fact to address them.
And the only thing that I was trying to show is the societies we have that are suffering from extremely high levels of violence,
just like the resources to inform policymakers about what they can do to address these problems.
And one of the side effects of this, for instance, can be in places like Brazil is not a good example.
But, you know, Venezuela and Colombia places with the other good examples.
But because there is a lack of the academic capacity to do good research, high quality research on these issues, there is to maybe a higher tendency.
Well, I'm not sure about this, maybe a high tendency to adopt quick punitive strategies rather than maybe that of public health policies.
That was my argument. If I can just respond particularly on the colonialism, but I understand.
Appreciate your answer. But I think it responded as though colonialism is a discrete moment in history as opposed to an ongoing
relationship that informs the way that countries and their economies interact with one another.
So even in the comparison of Singapore and Jamaica, those two countries, economically and socially, politically,
have very different interactions with the government of Western Europe and the United States than than one another.
And so I think that economic and social and political interactions do not just stop with the independence of a state from a colonial power,
but that we understand the ways that countries interact with each other is not
within a vacuum of historiography and sort of their formal ways of interacting.
So I really appreciate I guess I was trying to just clarify where I was coming from on that point, but then I appreciate your answer.
I just want I just want to put to say one thing, but I've been thinking about this for quite a long time, and I think it bears on your point.
If we try to zoom ourselves back to 1960, right before both Jamaica and Singapore become independent,
which countries would they have been predicted to do better?
And I've been looking at some of the evidence that nobody has studied this.
We don't know. But on many indicators at a time, probably our prediction was seeing that Jamaica would be doing better than Singapore.
I'm not sure about this, sir, but I think my argument is that, yes, we need to look at these factors.
But my argument wasn't so. Just trying to make a colour to create some controversy.
There are in-house factors or internal dynamics.
The responsibility of the political actors within these societies that have contributed to at least exacerbating the problems that they're having.
That's not just due to colonialism. That's what's that's my argument to.
Yes. Thank you. So to the science, you had information that caught my attention all the time.
Latin America, Long Island showed a very high homicide rate.
On another slide, a few slides of states showed very low rates of intimate partner violence or relatively low rates intimate partner violence.
And that attracts my attention because you would have thought those two types of offences might be have similar rates in different jurisdictions.
And so think about that,
why you continue to present and quantify the part of the story that stated those two different rates might be found in drug use.
Drug trafficking, especially across borders, are more similar of the violence associated with drugs.
And given that's one of the most obvious areas where public policy and health policy in particular crossover with this crime policy,
I wondered if you had wondered why you have to say anything about, I suppose, about some trafficking parties and how is this related to.
It seems like now that we have an interdisciplinary interest.
Yes, absolutely. I completely agree that we need to think about large legal markets, not just rocks of many other legal markets.
I think I'm one of the markets I just want to bring up is small arms markets,
which I think is just as important because one of the drivers that leads to the very high
levels of homicide in Latin America is not necessarily just high levels of violence.
When you look at these indicators unfolding, Latin America is not particularly high in terms of schools for it.
When we look at indicators of child problem behaviours in earlier, Latin America is not for particularly problematic children.
There is something happening at the age of 16 to 20 that's drives up this homicide rates in particular.
The problem is not lack of laws. All Latin American countries have absolutely exemplary laws that prohibit the use and dissemination of firearms.
The problem is they're there, they're used, and they are one by the responsible for the homicides.
And many of these killings killing matches, they are linked to the drug trafficking.
To drug trafficking. I'm just one I'm just taking the opportunity to come back to Jamaica because it's an interesting problem.
Initially, the violence problems in some of the poorer neighbourhoods in Kingston were not linked to drug trafficking.
They were initially linked to protection rackets against political opponents and political opponents.
Drug trafficking came in later in the 1970s and it used the gang power structures that had already been established.
And so there was a different economy, kind of like using the structures that were already there.
But it was not the very beginning of the problem.
So I just think we need to be a little bit cautious about just assuming that the drugs are the only problem.
And I think one of the things I just want to finish with this is one of the things I don't think we really understand very well at this moment.
And what is really important to understand, in fact, it is what the right drug policy is.
There's probably a wide assumption in this room.
I don't know that legalising drugs is a good policy now.
And I'm aware that before politics I'm absolutely in favour of legalising cannabis.
But when you look at the current evidence in Uruguay, it doesn't look that fantastic.
It doesn't look look that fantastic at all. And so there have been huge promises made that poor innovations nobody has really thought
about to make a proper evaluation about what is happening during this transition.
And the evidence doesn't look that convincing.
And so I'm just you know, those of you what I would like to say, well, we know about the problems and we know what we need to do.
I'm just warning. It looks like there may be somewhere down the line something backfiring.
And the evidence just does not hold up to the huge expectations that some people have with the legalisation of cannabis and justice about this.
The major number of the drugs, not cost of the homicides, are not related to cannabis.
They're related to cocaine. So the question would then really be, would it be consensus to legalise cocaine?
So that's the trickle of people, president.
The fact. Take that.
Well, I mean I mean, just to add to this debate, the I think the discussion between criminalise and not criminalise is a wrong discussion.
That's that's a serious. Yeah.
The dual world view that just doesn't correspond to the reality.
There are thousands of different models within within the criminalisation regime and the dozens of people involved in the legalisation regime.
So it's much more useful to think about what model of regulation one thinks is the best.
Is that not the crux of the debate? They say it's not the criminal law issue, it's the welfare issue.
We're changing the way in which we regulate them.
The legalisation debate was on the rise and there was not explicitly that we should be allowed to into the system.
And so that's why it has been moving out of the criminal debate and if more wanted to comprehend.
But absolutely, yeah. But this is exactly where the public health and technology to talk to each other.
Yes, that's right. But some of the city's challenges is just not pointing a U.S. citizen.
If you have Jamaica that they take the phones in this way now,
they really put on the Mexico of maybe have some particularities that could be very interesting to study there.
Yes. Well, I think it's particularly mentioned Latin America is a big gap.
We have Brazil below us in softball, but for reasons we just couldn't predict, it fell out of the study.
We think this is a major gap. We want to try and find a new site.
But at the moment, for this time of year, just in the middle of a train that's running at quite high speed,
and this is not the right moment to think about recruiting a new site,
because if you think about it, it needs carefully evaluation to find the right people, finding the right people.
But broadly speaking, the criteria was to cover all these major areas in low and middle income countries across the world.
The second very important criterion was do we have some face evidence stuff that
governments in these countries might be interested in violence prevention policy?
So several of these countries are so-called Pathfinder countries, which is kind of like a global movement to address violence against children.
And four out of five actually out of these eight countries are so-called Pathfinder countries.
So we believe that we want to find open doors in these countries to actually do something.
And the third and probably most important question was all of those people that we can work with.
Well, it's not just us, but you've also been good at them.
So, you know, I think if you draw Venn diagram, those people and academics, that's really hard to come back to.
But but but if you think about how you want to work with a large group of people over the extended period of time,
people are willing to commit to work in such projects, have the requisite skills already to go into this.
That's not quite easy. Okay.
Well, I just. Sorry.
It's just one last question. So thank you for your presentation. Very interesting.
Lots of food for thought. Following up a little bit on on the question of I am not suggesting you sit at it,
but I'm wondering if you've thought along the way about whether the decision to exclude weird countries from this study was deliberate and if so, why?
Yes. We actually had the discussion today about the fact that from.
Initially we have thought about including one athlete something we that various ideas.
I mean obviously this is in addition to Latin America.
So we have to react to big events and we'll talk about this when we meet in Manilla.
One is Latin America. Shall we have another side and the other one, shall we have another site in the UK and US?
At the moment, the only discussion that we have,
all the discussions about the site in Switzerland depends on where you want to get funding to make decisions about it.
We put a city by the site a in a Scandinavian country.
Um, there are two reasons why we haven't done this, and I think it's I just want to highlight the second reason.
Well, first of all, prevention of breastfeeding is purely cosmetic.
If you think about these eight sites, if you're at other sites in Europe, you're adding about a third of the costs.
So in terms of just how much is cost, it's usually much more expensive.
And that's just on the pragmatic side. So there is a much more interesting and I think important argument in terms of the project dynamics.
If you're at a site and that goes back to colonialism, by the way, I think if you had a site,
especially if you had a site like Switzerland, you know, that's what we have for initially think or Scandinavian country.
Then you end up having a dynamic where there is, you know,
the beacon of welfare state and doing everything right doesn't have to solve all the
problems and everything sort of is focussed on the comparison between this affluent country.
And I think in terms of the dynamics that have been happening so far,
I think the absence of a affluent country was actually a benefit rather than a deficit,
because it it strengthens the idea of the south south collaboration of learning across sites in the Global South rather than everybody thinking about,
well, what evidence do they have and what can we learn from the site?
Is it in Europe? It's.
I think the rules, by the way, I mean, just that just to conclude, I mean, this is an interesting debate also to be had about these firefighters work.
And there is a quite an interesting discussion here around a number of complicated issues that we could pursue further.
One is that some of these goals in the fire framework are perceived in some of the sites as very well.
Cummins and some of the sites they're perceived as being quite biased in what they focus on.
And so there is a lot of sensitivities in different places about, well, what does it mean?
You know, the Centres for Disease Control in the United States have been involved in developing these goals and
are now kind of like globally disseminating what they think is provided around training program.
What they think is right is kind of like social skills program. This is actually true or is it not true and it should work differently about this.
And that's that's a it's an interesting dilemma.
And I'm not always sure that what the recipes that are inspired are any better
than what some of the countries that we have in the study are already doing.
Well, thank you very much once again.