Violent crime is like infectious disease – and we know how to stop it spreading

Violent crime is like infectious disease – and we know how to stop it spreading

6 years ago
Anonymous $hM_jrxqbr-

https://phys.org/news/2018-07-violent-crime-infectious-disease.html

One young man came into the hospital in the middle of the night, with a knife wound across his face. Goodall dreaded the morning ward round the next day, when she would have to tell him that it would be impossible to reduce the appearance of the scar. But his reaction surprised her. "He was very offhand about it," she says. "Some of his friends came to see him later that afternoon and I realised why it wasn't going to be a problem for him – because they all had one. He'd just joined the club." The incident has stayed with her, an indication of how bad the situation in her city had become.

In 2005, the United Nations published a report declaring Scotland the most violent country in the developed world. The same year, a study by the World Health Organization (WHO) of crime figures in 21 European countries showed that Glasgow was the "murder capital" of Europe. More than 1,000 people a year required treatment for facial trauma alone, many of them as the result of violence.