Since 2018, the UK government have adopted a national public health approach to ‘serious violence’ (SV), which focuses on youth violence, knife crime, and gang-associated exploitation activities such as ‘county-lines’ drug trafficking. In April 2018, Public Health England published a ‘Serious Violence Strategy’, which was specifically aimed at tackling the increased ‘knife crime, gun crime and homicide across England’ (Public Health England, 2019b). In this strategy they defined SV as:

It is clear from this definition that the core aim of the SV Strategy is to deal with street-based, gang-associated crime. This is reinforced by the associated funding for ‘violence reduction units’, which shared £35 million to create multi-agency hubs to deal with associated crimes (APCC, 2020). At the time of writing only half of the 18 new dedicated violence reduction units, set up using the SV prevention duty, have domestic violence and abuse (DVA) as part of their strategy (Y. Roberts, 2021). It appears violence that is considered serious is also aligned with that which is public, whereas private violence is hidden behind closed doors. This is despite available evidence that DVA takes up a significant amount of police time and resources (Oliver et al, 2019).

The Serious Violence Prevention Duty is part of the wider Police, Crime, and Sentencing Bill, which has been marred with controversy over concerns around its wider social implications. Human Rights watchdog, Liberty (2021), have lamented that it is ‘One of the most serious threats to human rights and civil liberties in recent history’, as it offers increased police and state powers in a range of areas aimed at public control.