Scotland was the ‘murder capital of Europe’. Then it started treating violence like a disease

For the SVRU, this meant getting out of the police station and into hospitals, schools, social work departments, youth work and communities. Dentists were trained to intervene – recognising violence-related injury, documenting it as such and signposting patients to sources of help while they were still in the chair. And education chiefs were convinced to stop excluding pupils: in 2022/23, there were fewer than 12,000 exclusions in Scotland compared to a high of almost 45,000 in 2006/7.