HIS laughter was spontaneous, high-pitched and joyous. Some time over the last week or so a man videoed a brawl right in the heart of one of Glasgow’s main drags of pubs and clubs.

A night-out in Disney fancy dress had ended badly and he had a phone to capture the action.

Somewhere in the melee there was a Tinker Bell, with two little fairy wings pinned to her back, and a Peter Pan, dressed in fluorescent green.

Hair was pulled. Somebody ended up on a wet pavement that was, in that very Scottish way, sparkling in the street lights.

“Tinker Bell’s gaun for it, man, oh my God,” the video-er laughed as he filmed. “Yas!”

The video was posted on social media. Some people loved it. “That’s got to be the funniest looking scrap ever,” said one commenter, according to the Daily Record, which had picked this, erm, story up.

A square-go between cartoon characters might well be ridiculous. But is it funny? Is it entertaining?

Well, obviously it is for a lot of people. Still. Even now, a decade and a half after the old Strathclyde Police decided that it alone could not defeat violence, that there was no place for bystanders, political or personal, who did nothing.

Scots have changed since the creation of the now much-praised and much-replicated Violence Reduction Unit or VRU in 2006.

We are less violent than we once were. Our young people, especially so.

Last year there were 35% fewer homicides in Scotland than there were in 2010. This figure fell even faster in Glasgow, by 41%. This is historic.

But have we changed enough? No. Worse: the big decreases in serious violent offending, the VRU soberly acknowledged last week, “have now levelled off”.

Statistics for crimes like homicides and serious assaults are flatlining – something that has been clear for a while now.

So what next?

Last week the VRU published its latest five-year plan, a framework for building on Scotland’s 2007 declaration of violence as a public health issue by a then young and new health secretary called Nicola Sturgeon.

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The new plan did not make the kind of headlines you might expect for, say, a street scuffle by Neverland Cosplayers. But it is worth reading nevertheless.

The reasons for violence are complex and so are the measures to prevent it. I am not going to do a run-through of everything envisaged the latest document, called, rather unimaginatively, A Safer Scotland for All.

One idea which shows how far thinking on violence has moved beyond law enforcement is a proposed focus on “place-led” interventions. What does that mean? Well, it implies better co-ordination between service providers – not just the police – in any given area. But it is also a buzzword for empowering communities, giving people back agency over their neighbourhoods.

It’s not rocket science but having control over our lives, having a stake in where we live, makes us less likely to hurt others. But it is not something that even just a couple of decades or so ago you would have expected to hear from cops.

It makes sense to drill down in to local data too. The VRU has a truly chilling statistic. The progress, that decline in violence? Well, it just didn’t happen in the 15% most deprived places in Scotland.

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Unveiling the new vision, VRU director Niven Rennie called for evidence-led public health push on violence to mirror the response to the pandemic.

“We’ve seen how effective following the science can be in the battle against Covid-19,” he said. “We must now apply the lessons learned over the last year in our efforts to reduce violence.”

But there is a warning in the VRU five-year plan too, about the challenges coronavirus has brought. There are concerns those violence statistics might start going up again. Lockdowns suppressed violence outside the home – yet provided opportunities for hurt indoors. Figures will reflect that.

But the response to the bug has put public services – and public finances – are under huge pressure. Some are at breaking point. So are some people. That spells trouble.

“Post-pandemic, there are a number of risk factors including increasing unemployment, post-Covid trauma, increased substance abuse, poor mental and physical health,” spelled out the new VRU document. “Such factors have the potential to contribute to increasing levels of violence which, if not addressed and supported, may reverse the historic reductions.”

The VRU does not get in to politics. I will. Take just one simple issue: welfare. The UK government is talking of stripping £20 a week off Universal Credit, reversing a Covid-era uplift. That will have many well-documented impacts. One of them: more children will live in homes with added stress, added desperation. We do not need to guess how that will play out in the future, how such trauma will affect some youngsters: we know it will come to smash us in the face.

The VRU has already helped change the way we talk about violence. But we still have so far to go.

Politicians can no longer pretend they do not know the consequences of trauma and poverty in early years. You cannot claim to be against violence and then do things you know will create it.

But fighting violence is not just about policy, it is also about culture.

A lot of Scots still need to have difficult conversations about violence and our attitudes to it; our jokes, our language, our popular culture, even the way we report our news.

Many men have still to come to terms with just how gendered a problem this is. Most killers are male. So are most of their victims.

It does not have to be this way. Most of us – including most men – learn not to hurt others. We can do this even late in life.

But can we, as a society, teach ourselves not to revel in fighting? Can our politics develop an understanding that actions have consequences that last longer than one minister’s career? Or is this too uncomfortably adult?

Scotland may have given the world the story of Peter Pan. But on violence we cannot be a nation of boys who never grow up.

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