Enriching the university experience through volunteering: A pilot project

This article details the first year of a collaborative effort between a campus-based university and its local Victim Support scheme. The key innovative component was that student volunteers were trained to provide support to peers who experienced crime. Not a formal evaluation, this paper outlines how the work appeared beneficial to the university, its students, and Victim Support. The first two benefited through improved on-campus service to victimised students and to those who were trained and worked as volunteers. Victim Support benefited from increased numbers of volunteers and consequently, improved services. Some implementation difficulties are also described. This study provides a platform for further efforts and their more formal evaluation

Enriching the university experience through volunteering: a pilot project

This article details the first year of a collaborative effort between a campus-based university and its local Victim Support scheme. The key innovative component was that student volunteers were trained to provide support to peers who experienced crime. Not a formal evaluation, this article outlines how the work appeared beneficial to the university, its students and Victim Support. The first two benefited through improved on-campus service to victimized students and to those who were trained and worked as volunteers. Victim Support benefited from increased numbers of volunteers and consequently improved services. Some implementation difficulties are also described. This study provides a platform for further efforts and their more formal evaluation

Violence and the crime drop

According to the Crime Survey for England and Wales, violence fell dramatically between 1995 and 2013/14. To improve understanding of the fall in violent crime, this study examines long-term crime trends in England and Wales over the past two decades, by scrutinizing the trends in (a) stranger and acquaintance violence, (b) severity of violence, (c) age groups, and (d) sexes. It draws on nationally representative, weighted data from the Crime Survey for England and Wales, and examines prevalence, incidence and crime concentration trends. The overall violence fall was driven by a decline in the victimization of young individuals and/or males perpetrated by acquaintances since 1995. Stranger and acquaintance violence followed different trajectories, with the former beginning to drop post 2003/4. Falls in both stranger and acquaintance violence incidence rates were led by a reduction in victims over time. Counting all incidents reported by the same victim (instead of capping at five incidents) significantly affects trends in stranger violence but not in acquaintance violence. In relation to the distributive justice within the crime drop, this study provides unique evidence of equitable falls in acquaintance violence but inequitable falls in stranger violence. These findings highlight the need to examine violence types separately and point to a number of areas for future research

Opportunities for physical assault in the night-time economy in England and Wales, 1981 - 2011/12

Building on a growing body of research linking an opportunity framework to drops in acquisitive crime and most recently, acquisitive violence, the present thesis extends this framework to the downward trajectory of nighttime economy violence in England and Wales, during the phenomenon of the crime drop. Using secondary data analysis of the Crime Survey for England and Wales, the rate of stranger and acquaintance violence within the night-time economy is found to have halved between 1995 and 2011/12; mirroring the dramatic declines experienced by other crime types within England and Wales, and more widely across other westernised countries. Disaggregating this overarching trend by offence and victim characteristics reveals a reduction in alcohol-fuelled, common assaults between young males, occurring in and around the drinking venues of the night-time economy, and during weekends, to be the main driver of the drop. Boden, Fergusson and Horwood (2013) argue that to date there is limited knowledge surrounding the nature of alcohol-related violence. The present research explores the nexus between alcohol and violence through a situational lens. The opportunistic nature of night-time economy violence is identified through offenders’ choice of tools (weapons) and selection of targets, as well as the clustering of violence along certain spatial, temporal, and individual, dimensions. The opportunity structure of night-time economy violence is established using multivariate modelling techniques designed to isolate the role of opportunity in assault-victimisation, and resultant severity, from the personal characteristics of the actors involved. Measures of a ‘risky lifestyle’, characterised by an increase in routine activities that take respondents away from the safety of the home, are found to be the strongest predictors of assault victimisation-risk across every available sweep of the survey. A significant shift in population lifestyle - namely a significant net decline in routine engagement with the drinking venues of the night-time economy, as well as a shift in the gender and age composition of drinking venue patronage - co-varies with the decline in night-time economy violence. However, residual effects of respondents’ socio-demographic characteristics on victimisation-risk, after mediating for differences in lifestyle, presents violent victimisation in the night-time economy as a result of a process by which personal traits interact with criminogenic environments. Personal characteristics, however, are weaker in their prediction of offence severity in the night-time economy. Rather, the present research supports a collection of research identifying the context of violence to be the strongest predictor of violent dispute escalation (Brennan, Moore & Shepherd, 2010; Marcus and Reio, 2002)

Evaluating harm-reduction initiatives in a night-time economy and music festival context

Pubs, clubs and music festivals are places characterized by increased alcohol consumption. Drinkaware, a UK alcohol awareness charity, delivered two crime-prevention initiatives designed to reduce alcohol-related harm among young adults: the “Drinkaware Crew” initiative implemented at night-time economy (NTE) venues, and, more recently, the Drinkaware “Festival Crew”. This chapter uses mixed methods to present (a) an outcome evaluation of the societal impact of the “Drinkaware Crew” initiative using routinely collected data, and (b) a process evaluation examining the transferability of the “Drinkaware Crew” initiative to a music festival-context. Findings indicate that the Drinkaware Crew occupy a unique gap in existing NTE and festival infrastructures. However, several improvements to the data available are recommended to ensure that such initiatives are thoroughly evidence-based