Lynn Ruane (Independent) | Oireachtas source

This is an important topic to discuss. Over the past year or two, I have been lucky enough to visit some violence intervention programmes in Newark in the United States. There are some amazing initiatives elsewhere. We do not need to recreate the wheel when we consider violence intervention, specifically. Ireland can look to Scotland and some of the initiatives in the United States and Sweden around violence intervention.

There is also the whole realm of community safety, which also includes the perception of safety. Some things are not measurable. We cannot always address people's perceptions of whether they are safe or not in a real and tangible way. There are many things we can do in that regard. To speak specifically to the violence intervention piece, there is an initiative in the United States founded by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. I met a guy over there who I have been working with closely to build a strategy. He is an academic and was the founder of the Boston ceasefire project. The evidence behind that project has shown that youth homicides have massively reduced through focused deterrence and group violence intervention initiatives. That does not happen instead of law enforcement but works in parallel with it. The approach is about looking at the group dynamics of violence and a model that intervenes in the moment to address violence in communities.It is a relationship-based model that requires a lot of trust, infrastructure and work but it is something we need to do.

We often react to situations of violence within the community by automatically looking to the police and saying we need more policing or more visibility of police, but even where present, the visibility of police has not reduced crime overall. The guillotine did not reduce crime overall. The public display of punishment and sentences have not decreased crime. The police’s ability to respond to and investigate crime is a necessary and important one but we cannot rely on the police to police us out of poverty and the core drivers of violence. All of the evidence shows that the core drivers of violence are humiliation, shame, not being able to meet one’s economic needs and one’s proximity to violence. Violence, in and of itself, breeds violence. The closer someone is to violence, the more likely that person is to experience violence or to experience the cycles and the revictimisation within that.

There are some models in the United States. There is an amazing one in the health sector. When somebody arrived at a hospital having clearly experienced a violence-related injury, there used to be a “treat and street” model where the person was treated and then allowed leave the hospital. What has now been introduced there is a wider community-based public safety model that involves partnerships with law enforcement and the other arms of justice, social services and the health sector, including doctors. There are trained community violence interventionists to work within the health system and communities in a partnership model to interrupt violence when it is happening. That is not just gang-related violence, although some of the models operated by the people I met were specifically developed during a time of heightened gang violence in the likes of LA. There is a guy called Aqeela Sherrills who negotiated the peace deal between the Crips and the Bloods in 1992. He was an ex-LA gang member but is now seen as a credible messenger and voice. He was someone who has the relatability and credibility within a particular world who went on to build a community-based public safety model that Scotland later relied on as well. It brought Aqeela Sherrills, David Kennedy and others over from the United States. That was at the request of the police in Scotland. I have had some communication with Karyn McCluskey, who oversees the Scottish violence reduction unit. Police in Scotland decided to move away from only seeing violence through the lens of justice to also seeing it through the public health lens.

The World Health Organization has a definition of violence as a public health issue. Treating it as such opens it up for us to deal with it in a much more holistic way. Part of the World Health Organization's definition is that violence is preventable rather than inevitable. It treats violence using a population disease model.

Regarding the men who are engaged in violence, there is a very small percentage of people who cause the most harm in a community when it comes to violence-related issues. However, no one is working with that group in a targeted way. It is only ever a police response, so we do not actually get to interrupt the violence. In the models being tried out in Sweden, Scotland and other places, people try to build and develop relationships within those communities so that, between a policing model, a community model and a health model, there are interventions that happen within the moment. We will never stop violence that happens as a random act, but those countries have systems to interrupt when there is potential for retaliation. A violence intervention team will not enable us to catch everything before it happens, but we can look at all of the other dynamics involved, for example, who else is impacted by the violence and whether we can intervene at all of the different pressure points in order to ensure there is no retaliatory violence within communities.

The umbrella term I find being used is "community violence", which is basically interpersonal violence. It is any type of violence that can happen within a community. Even though the focused deterrence and group violence intervention models had a relationship at one time with the illicit drug trade, they are not specifically set up to be about that trade. They are about the violence intervention piece in and of itself and are used in all types of community violence where there is a dynamic of group violence. Often, people think that, under a particular model, we just engage with the individual committing violence, but it is sometimes about the pressures of the community, an estate or a group in the context of reputation, image control or what the group expects a person to do in a given situation to save face. All these group dynamics can add to and fuel violence.

I am discussing these initiatives because, while I understand the reaction to opt for sentences, more police and so on, that must be done in parallel with other initiatives that are about reducing violence overall, not just responding to violence or a particular instance of violence. It is about looking at violence prevention in the widest possible sense.

I have worked with men who have committed violence. When I was doing theatre of the oppressed and so on in the prison, I brought the current Minister, Deputy O'Callaghan, in to do a bit of work. When you map the histories of many of the men who are perpetrating serious violence, you find that they were victims of violence in the first instance. Services, interventions, the education system and so on often did not intervene or were not aware at certain points of whether there was familial violence within the home, for example. People have been completely dehumanised and violence becomes a normalised behaviour. People also feel there is a reward system with violence. We need to be able to speak about that as well as the kind of relationship men have to violence in that regard. The problem is that, when men become more physically men in the world, we do not allow them the victimhood that came before the perpetration of the violence. In a sense, we separate them from their own histories, so we never get to truly and fully explore the shame, humiliation and events that happened to them in their lives and interrupt the violence. We must be a lot more open about how we engage with the topic so that, when we are considering legislative responses, we ensure we invest in communities and set up evidence-based violence intervention initiatives that are much more holistic and look at it as a public health issue and not just a justice one. We have to be willing to work long term to reduce violence, not just respond to it. It is a balancing act to get the two of those elements correct.

In the past few weeks, I have read a number of books by Édouard Louis, a French writer. He discusses violence though novels. A line I found in one of his books - I believe it was History of Violence- was about how, when violence was part of someone's daily rhythm, he or she ended up believing it was normal. If we want to get to the root causes of why violence becomes so normalised in people’s lives, we need to blow the conversation open a little so that we can work in a targeted way and interrupt violence within communities rather than just locking people up or calling for more prisons.