Reflections on good practice in evaluating Violence Reduction Units: Experiences from across England and Wales

Internationally, interpersonal violence places huge burdens on the health, wellbeing and prosperity of society. In response to a notable increase in serious knife crime, in 2019, the UK Government awarded & POUND;35 million for the establishment of 18 Violence Reduction Units (VRUs) across England and Wales. There has been limited evaluation of community-level approaches for violence, with almost no published literature on the impact of VRUs. The paper presents the approaches and experiences of two interdisciplinary teams of researchers from public health, psychology, criminology, and systems change, working as evaluators of four VRUs in England and Wales. The paper describes the value of adopting a whole-system approach to evaluations, outlines good practice in evaluating VRUs, and elicits challenges to developing and embedding evaluation within complex systems.