But the VRU was in strange company.<\/p>\n
It was launched alongside punitive law-and-order reforms that were widely criticised on human rights grounds<\/a>, including bail measures and adult sentences for children as young as 14. The VRU, though, is not a law-and-order program: it views violence as a public health issue, which therefore requires a public health response.<\/p>\n The model has its origins in the work of Karyn McCluskey, a former police officer and nurse who established the first VRU in Scotland in 2003<\/a> \u2013 a time when Glasgow was known as the murder capital of the world. More than 20 years on \u2013 14 with McCluskey helming the VRU \u2013 and the turnaround is stark: homicides, attempted murders and serious assaults<\/a> plummeted and stayed low, and in 2024 the country removed its last youth from prison.<\/p>\n \u201cWe jailed lots of people, [and it] didn\u2019t make any difference,\u201d McCluskey tells the Guardian.<\/p>\n \u201cIf that worked, we\u2019d have had no crime.\u201d<\/p>\n Instead, she says, they \u201cstarted talking about violence as a disease\u201d: one that was caught by \u201cbeing brought up in violent homes, whole communities where violence is prevalent\u201d. They examined how violence spread, and how to treat it.<\/p>\n Sign up for the Breaking News Australia email <\/a><\/p>\n \u201cThat took us into that very preventive space,\u201d McCluskey says.<\/p>\n McCluskey has been in Australia this week, speaking at violence reduction seminars, including the first held by Victoria\u2019s VRU. She has been working closely with Davidson \u2013 whose appointment recently became permanent, with the program receiving a $30m funding boost \u2013 to establish the state scheme.<\/p>\n Points of interruption<\/p>\n The strategy is not to create a whole new layer of social services, but to slide into existing structures, such as schools and hospitals, with targeted and localised interventions.<\/p>\n Some of the earliest and most critical work in Scotland<\/a> occurred not in justice centres but in hospitals. \u201cThey were the people who came forward first and said, \u2018we\u2019ve had enough\u2019,\u201d McCluskey says. \u201cThey were fantastic about giving us the information around what was happening.<\/p>\n double quotation mark I\u2019m sick and tired of attending children\u2019s funeralsAndrea Davidson, Victorian VRU interim head<\/p>\n \u201cWe had pubs and venues where violence was an issue and we didn\u2019t know about them, so they were giving us details like that, but we were also picking up lots of tit-for-tat violence.\u201d<\/p>\n That data was critical in helping to map violence that was not coming to the attention of police. It also highlighted a key opportunity for prevention \u2013 \u201ca real point of interruption\u201d, McCluskey says, when people turned up \u201cwith a stab wound in their arse \u2026 plotting their revenge\u201d.<\/p>\n Davidson has drawn on this directly. She is putting the finishing touches on a program \u2013 the first of its kind in Australia \u2013 to embed youth workers and \u201clived experience\u201d mentors into the Alfred and Royal Children\u2019s hospitals to intervene when a young person is admitted with traumatic injuries from violence.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat I saw as the commissioner for youth justice is every time a kid ends up in the justice system on a really heinous crime, you follow it back and they\u2019ve had heinous crimes done to them,\u201d Davidson says.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a>Free newsletter | When needed<\/p>\n Sign up to Breaking News Australia<\/p>\n Get the most important news as it breaks<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n \u201cSo when a young person turns up to an emergency department or in a trauma ward, there will be an immediate response from a youth worker \u2026 rather than wait for them to retaliate, enact violence themselves and ultimately end up in the justice system.\u201d<\/p>\n Another program, the first to roll out, put social workers in 23 schools where kids were deemed most at risk of turning to violence. Those schools were selected based on extensive data analysis to identify precisely where violence was originating, drawing on justice data, crime statistics, health information, school attendance rates, qualitative analysis from law enforcement, and postcode-level analyses of disadvantage<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2018You can\u2019t achieve this in a short-term political cycle\u2019 \u2026 Karyn McCluskey and Andrea Davidson in Melbourne. Photograph: Steph Convery\/The Guardian<\/p>\n \u201cWe need to think about how we tailor local, hyper-local responses,\u201d Davidson says. \u201cThere\u2019s some brilliant examples of that work in Scotland \u2013 I went into a couple of those housing estate-type locations where they had just turned it around statistically in five to 10 years.\u201d<\/p>\n Post-election unknowns<\/p>\n The VRU\u2019s remit is not just youth violence, though that has been its focus so far. Davidson says she is beginning to explore connections between adult homelessness and retail violence. It\u2019s work that hints at the scale of some of the likely underlying problems: there are 189,536 people on Victoria\u2019s public housing waitlist, and the median wait time is 10 months for those assessed as in greatest need.<\/p>\n But there\u2019s a more immediate shadow looming over the nascent program: the November state election.<\/p>\n The government\u2019s recent hardline moves on crime have been seen as an attempt by Labor to outflank the Liberal party<\/a> on its own turf. With the VRU, the Labor government appears to be having a bet each way, bundling its preventive, restorative, public health approach in with punitive justice measures, and calling the program \u201cserious consequences, early interventions\u201d.<\/p>\n The state\u2019s police commissioner, Mike Bush, appears to be walking a similar line, coming into the job a year ago with \u201ca prevention mindset and a prevention focus\u201d<\/a>, while recently calling for mandatory minimum sentencing<\/a> for youth offenders.<\/p>\n Davidson is diplomatic about these apparent contradictions. \u201cWe\u2019re in an environment where these two [approaches] coexist,\u201d she says. \u201cI think it\u2019s important to acknowledge that they\u2019re on the same spectrum.\u201d<\/p>\n Labor claims the Liberal party intends to axe the VRU if elected; the opposition declined to confirm or deny this when approached for comment by Guardian Australia.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/2998.jpg\")
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