Shortcut: Australia's Violence Crisis: Lessons From Scotland

**Meshel Laurie** (0:03)
This is Australian True Crime with Meshel Laurie. Australia is in the middle of a difficult conversation about violence. From youth crime to knife attacks and domestic violence, politicians, police and communities are all searching for answers. So what if one country has already been through this and found a way to dramatically reduce violent crime? Karyn McCluskey helped lead that transformation As one of the founders of Scotland's Violence Reduction Unit, she helped change Glasgow from one of Europe's most violent cities into an international case study in violence prevention by treating violence as a public health issue and not just a criminal justice problem.
Today, she speaks with Australian True Crime's producer Matthew Tankard to explain what worked, what didn't and what Australia can learn from Scotland's experience.
This is Australian True Crime. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is created, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. And a warning, this episode of the podcast contains graphic descriptions of violence.

**Karyn McCluskey** (1:13)
We actually started in 2003 And I was head of intelligence analysis. We were made national in 2004
And I was just overwhelmed. It wasn't just, you know, we'd have a, you know, somebody would say there's been a murder. Sometimes we'd have three and four on a weekend. And it was just, everybody else was, they just thought that was what happened. You know, that was just Glasgow, that was Scotland. We had, you know, a level of violence. And people just thought that was, and I hate to use the word normal, but you know what I mean? That when things happen so frequently, it does become normalized. I used to be a trained nurse originally. I don't think I was a very great nurse, but I trained as a nurse and wait to hang around as an emergency department. And actually you have a great surgeon, actually based in Australia now, who was actually one of our main emergency and medicine consultants, who was based in Glasgow. A man called Michael Sheridan, and he did a really unusual thing. He counted the amount of people who were coming in as a result of violence. And what you found was only 30 percent were reporting to the police.
So, regardless of how bad we thought it was, it was actually much worse. And then United Nations came out and said that Scotland was the most violent country in Europe, and Glasgow was the most violent city. And so I went away and I took three weeks and I just wrote a report for the Chief Constable at the time. And what it really said was, despite the best 30 years of policing, we've been fantastic at detecting, but actually we've made no difference to trying to prevent this happening in the first place. So if you think about it, a crime is committed, it's then reported, we then investigate it. Sometimes you'll have an outcome, you'll get a detection or not, and then you put someone in jail. And that's the criminal justice model. And we wanted to think about prevention. And of course, I had a health background, et cetera.
We looked at a public health model, which was about prevention. How could we? So firstly, did we understand what the level of the problem was? So surveillance. Then we tried to work out all the risk and protective factors. People excluded from school, drugs, alcohol, poverty, people excluded from work, a whole range. So we worked out what the risk and protective factors were. And then in truth, we went into prisons, we interviewed people, we looked at the background. And there's actually lots and lots of research out there about what drives people into this, what happens in those families. And we had whole families where we jailed grandfathers, fathers, and sons for violence. And I think it's a conversation that we missed out for many decades, was for it was to be a man in 21st century Scotland. You know, it actually takes more of a man to walk away from a fight, than it does to face up to it.
But that's a challenging cultural piece. So that was part of it. But obviously we worked on, obviously dealing with those who were committing violence, both who had been victimized and were perpetrators. Worked with lots of schools about trying to keep kids in schools. Exclusion is a thing that goes through.
Every person who I've met in jail through violence, their story always starts with, see when I was five, see when I was six, see when I was 12
And then starts about school exclusion. And I don't know where we think kids are going to go when, you know, they're excluded from school, they're on the streets. And doesn't it say that trouble always finds trouble? And then people got into the justice system and the justice system is like an infection. Once you get it once, it can come lifelong and life-limiting. You know, you're constantly in it. So trying to keep people out of the justice system where we could was incredibly important. So one of the big things that we started, and it was very public, was we had to tackle the gangs. We got all the gangs in a room. And when we brought them into a room, we even shipped them in from the prisons. And we did this, you know, we had the Chief Constable, you know, stand up. We flashed the pictures around the room. And we said, look, we know where you live. We know what you're doing. And we're telling you now, that's it, it's finished. The next one of you that commits an offense, we're going to take out your whole gang.