Practical tools
This toolkit is for children (under 18 years) and adults (over 18 years), please make sure you know the date of birth of the person you are concerned about and follow the right referral route. If you need to make a referral please visit the support page to find out how.
Violence and its root causes are complex, and any response should be carefully considered and tailored to the individual. We always advocate a partnership approach, working with other partners to help deliver a consistent measured response. Tools to tackle serious violence will depend on the behaviours you are seeking to deal with, and will range from early intervention and prevention, through to enforcement where there is immediate risk of serious violence.
The public health approach to serious violence sets out 3 levels of response:
Primary: preventing the problem in the first place. Primary level programmes are universally accessed programmes, designed to provide early education, training and guidance, in order to prevent violence eg education programmes to children
Secondary: intervening early when the problem starts to emerge, and seek to resolve it, such as response to violence towards those people who are at risk of violence and intervening appropriately. We aim to intervene at reachable teachable moments.
Tertiary: providing good management to people who are committing violence, in order to avoid crisis and its harmful consequences, eg partnership working to bring people together to provide a multi-pronged approach to someone committing violence.
We urge you to consider
- What is the issue I am trying to solve and do I understand the risk being posed by someone?
- Who else do I need to help with this?
- How do I refer people for more help or flag risk that I am not able to deal with?
Having honest conversations with people about knife crime and serious violence can be hard, here is a guide and recorded webinar to help you.
