VISION

Violence, Health and Society

UKPRP award £7.1 million for 5 years, with additional in-kind investment from the consortium’s partners

The Violence, Health and Society Consortium (VISION) aims to reduce the violence that harms health by improving the measurement and analysis of data on violence.

Research Director

Professor Sylvia Walby

Director, Violence and Society Centre

City, University of London

Sylvia Walby established and leads the interdisciplinary research centre, Violence and Society, at City, University of London. The Centre addresses theory, measurement and change in violence through research and engagement with practitioners and policy makers. Sylvia Walby is Professor of Sociology, and Chair of the REF Sociology Sub Panel. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and recipient of the Anneliese Maier Research Award from the Humboldt Foundation. She was the first Chairholder of the UNESCO Chair of Gender Research at Lancaster University, and was the founding President of the European Sociological Association. Her research has been funded by the UKRI/ESRC, UKRI/MRC, European Commission, the World Bank and UNESCO. For the Council of Europe, for the Istanbul Convention, Walby and colleagues wrote The Concept and Measurement of Violence against Women and Men – Policy Press 2017

Our research

Improving the data needed to develop better interventions to reduce violence and thereby improve health is the aim of the Violence, Health and Society Consortium. Improving and integrating fragmented data with a shared framework is core to our work. Better and more integrated data will be used to test and develop theory and to assess which interventions are more effective. Violence causes harms to health: by helping to reduce violence, the Consortium reduces health inequalities and improves the health of the population. We have special interest in domestic and sexual violence, which are neglected in the evidence base despite public concern. We are developing cooperation between academics and practitioners, Universities and policy makers, data providers and data users. The Consortium will: 1. Develop a theory of change of violence, health and society applying a complex systems approach. 2. Improve measurement by applying and developing a measurement framework for violence and abuse to enable system-wide collaboration, across disciplines and practitioner communities, and to overcome existing fragmentation. 3. Integrate and link data from multiple sources. 4. Investigate causal pathways between violence, health and society, including those associated with inequalities including gender. 5. Evaluate the cost-effectiveness of intervention systems.

Consortium members

VISION, Violence, Health and Society, engages:

Co-investigators with expertise across the social and health sciences, in Sociology, Public Health, Primary Care, Criminology, Psychiatry, Security, Gender Studies, Economics, Law, Political Science, Computer Science, Social Statistics, Epidemiology, Health Informatics, and Public Policy
Providers of data on violence, including Office for National Statistics, NHS Digital, Public Health Wales, Women’s Aid, Refuge, Safe Lives, Rape Crisis, Imkaan, Respect, Lancashire Constabulary, and National Centre for Domestic Violence.
Users of data on violence, including the Department for Health and Social Care, Home Office, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, the Commissioner for Domestic Abuse, Commissioner for Victims, Commissioner for Anti-Slavery, Public Health England, and the National Police Chief’s Council lead for violence and vulnerability.