The truth about violence

IT'S NO wonder many of us are afraid to leave our homes. You have only to read the papers to see that Britain's streets are becoming a battleground where the law-abiding citizen runs the gauntlet of rampaging young thugs, psychopaths released into the community and armed drugs gangs fighting turf wars.

The evil stranger lurking in the shadows is a nightmare that haunts us all from childhood, and the perceived threat to our safety from persons unknown is certainly one that many of us are ready to accept. The media eagerly feeds us with scare stories which it knows will be hungrily devoured. So as England and Wales recorded its fifth successive year of falling crime last week, 91 per cent of the population remained unaware of the trend.

Figures released by the Home Office showed that crime recorded by the police had dropped by 8 per cent, yet evidence that violent crime had increased by 1 per cent was promptly seized on as proof of our increasingly "brutal society". Nothing was going to be allowed to shake the view that the bogeyman was out there; it was still not safe for elderly people to do their shopping, and under no circumstances could children be allowed to go to school on their own. But the myth of "stranger danger" will be exploded in a report issued tomorrow at the start of the biggest- ever evaluation of violence in British society. The pounds 3.5m, publicly funded Violence Research Programme has been set up by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and will be launched by Lord Williams of Mostyn, the Home Office minister. To start the five-year programme, its director, Betsy Stanko, of Brunel University, has produced a 44-page analysis of current knowledge about violent Britain.

Called Taking Stock: What Do We Know About Violence?, it concludes: "The widespread perception of violence - random acts by strangers - is not based on fact." The level of fear is controlled by myths, according to Professor Stanko. "What we get from the police is that we are in danger from gangland battles, hooligans and animal rights activists," she says. "They are always talking about Mr Bigs when in fact it is the Mr Smalls who we live with and work with who are the real perpetrators of violence."

THE EVIDENCE of centuries past helps put today's crime levels in perspective. For example, your chances of becoming a homicide victim in the city of Oxford in the year 1340 were more than 80 times greater than your risk of being bumped off in England and Wales today. The punch-up was a far more common sight in the last century. Historical records show there were 98,000 assaults per year in England during the 1870s, but by 1975 the annual figure had fallen to 16,500.

Fears of the degeneration of British society were raised once again last week as figures emerged showing that some crimes of violence - notably robbery and assault - were more prevalent in police statistics in England and Wales than in those in America.

But as the Home Office released its annual statistics on Tuesday, it also published the results of the biennial British Crime Survey, which is based on a questioning of 15,000 households. Covering an estimated 16.4 million offences, compared to the 4.9 million recorded by police, it is reckoned by criminologists to be the most accurate assessment of crime in England and Wales.

According to the survey, violent crime has fallen by 17 per cent since 1995, and instances of violence by strangers have dropped by 28 per cent. Stranger violence has now fallen by nearly one-fifth (19 per cent) since the survey started 1981.

No one is held more responsible for violence in modern British society than the teenage yobbo. The Sunday Times talked last week of the emergence of a pan-European youth underclass, which it described as a "teenage time- bomb". Yet this demonisation of youth ignores the fact that youngsters are far more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators.

The most victimised age group in society is the 12-to-15-year-old bracket, of whom one-third have been assaulted within the last eight months. Similarly, 10-to-15-year-olds - male and female - are the most likely group to be raped. While adults may run scared of delinquent yobs, youngsters themselves are even more afraid of venturing out at night. But the people they need to fear most are their own relatives and school-mates. Most assaults on children are in school, yet almost half of schools still have no procedure for reporting and recording violence.

And while public attention focuses on notorious sex attackers such as Sidney Cooke and Robert Oliver, the killers of 14-year-old Jason Swift, it ignores the fact that, statistically speaking, there is a sex offender in every street. The ESRC study points out that one in 60 men born in 1953 had a conviction for a sexual offence by the time they were 40; at that ratio, there could be in excess of 250,000 sex offenders aged 20 or more in the population. Of those who prey on children, three-quarters pick on victims they know.

While women's groups have held marches to "reclaim the streets", they are at greater risk in their own homes. Around 10 per cent of women have been the victims of domestic violence in the last year, and four out of five of them have been attacked by their partner or ex-partner.

Men should also be less wary of the dark alleyway and more concerned about their workplace, which is where nearly 40 per cent of assaults take place. In 71 per cent of cases the victim knows his assailant.

Meanwhile, the feuding drugs gangs that capture the headlines present negligible risk to the public. The report notes: "Little evidence exists on the relationship between drugs and violence - and what does exist is inconclusive."

Professor Stanko concludes: "Stranger violence is, and always has been, the rarest form of violence, whereas assault and homicide by known others - typically acquaintances, spouses, parents and employers or co-workers - dominate."

SO WHY do we still fear the bogeyman? Part of the explanation is proxy knowledge. While domestic violence goes on largely behind closed doors, news of a street robbery passes quickly by word of mouth in an age of electronic mail and telephones in every household. As a consequence, nearly a quarter of the population claim to know someone who has been mugged or robbed in the last year. A fifth say they know the victim of an assault. So while we may not have been attacked ourselves we know someone who has been, and that scares us.

The pattern has been exacerbated by the emergence in recent years of a host of pressure groups which have raised awareness of the violence perpetrated on women, gay men, ethnic and religious minorities, and people with disabilities.

Politicians have seen the value of playing up violent crime to create a dragon that they can be seen to take on. And the police have learnt to speak up for themselves, realising that stark warnings of violence on the streets help to emphasise the need for more and better-paid police officers.

As the Stanko report points out: "For hundreds of years, leading politicians, campaigners and judges have made completely unsubstantiated pronouncements about the links between violence, alcohol and the barbarity of certain groups of people. Such unproven associations continue to be made today." The idea that Britain is descending into a spiral of violence that is tearing apart civilised society is unfounded - the country is no more dangerous today than it has been in the past. But in our ignorance we're scaring ourselves witless.