Violence Prevention Framework for Scotland: Monitoring Framework, 2025

Risk and protective factors for violence

Scotland’s public health approach to tackling violence is set out in the Violence Prevention Framework, informed by the World Health Organisation’s social-ecological model (see Figure 2 below). This encourages violence prevention interventions to focus on reducing risk factors and increasing protective factors at an individual, relationship, community and societal level.

Figure 2: The World Health Organisation social ecological model for understanding and preventing violence (World Health Organisation, 2022).

Scotland’s approach to preventing violence against women and girls (VAWG) – set out in the joint Scottish Government and COSLA strategy, Equally Safe – is also informed by the public health model of violence prevention, identifying violence as an abuse of power that occurs at individual, relationship, community, and societal levels, and which involves a continuum of connected behaviours including physical, sexual, verbal and emotional abuse. It emphasises that VAWG is gendered, stemming from unequal power relations between men and women and cultural norms that reinforce aggressive and violent forms of masculinity.

In acknowledging the different levels at which risk and protective factors exist, a public health approach suggests that in order to prevent violence, it is necessary to act across multiple levels at the same time and that a sustained reduction in violence requires a shared agenda across sectors and organisations.

In promoting a public health approach to violence prevention, the VPF brings together and highlights some of the work being taken forward across government and with partners which – while not all directly targeting violence-reduction outcomes – will contribute to preventing and reducing risk of (and harms from) violence across the life course, thereby contributing to progress towards the VPF long term vision. These include (but are not limited to) policies and actions to address:

• Violence against women and girls
• Poverty
• Problem alcohol and drug use
• Adverse childhood experiences and trauma
• Serious organised crime
• Anti-social behaviour
• Improving outcomes for care experienced individuals
• Hate crime
• Suicide prevention

More detail on these specific policy areas can be found within relevant policy documents, strategies, research and monitoring/measurement frameworks for individual topics.

The VPF Action Plan seeks to complement and support these cross-cutting preventative policies, as one part of the wider violence prevention eco-system, while more specifically targeting (but not limited to) prevention of non-sexual interpersonal violence.

As the Monitoring Framework (MF) is focused on understanding the extent and nature of violence in Scotland (step 1 on the public health approach; Figure 1), it does not include indicator measures to monitor prevention (i.e., changes in risk and protective factors for violence). It does, however, where available and relevant to understanding indicator trends, include – on a measure by measure basis – supplementary evidence on characteristics associated with greatest risk of violence.

The longer term focus of the MF acknowledges that progress to address the underlying causes of violence, particularly that achieved through action to target primary prevention, will take time to become evident in the national level data on violence reduction outcomes which are monitored here.