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In the first week at her new job, Andrea Davidson received a call from the deputy director of trauma at one of Melbourne’s major hospitals.

“He said, ‘Andrea, I’m sick and tired of patching these kids up and hoping they don’t come back, and then seeing them turn up six months later and this time … they die’,” Davidson says.

“He and I really connected on that, because I’m sick and tired of attending children’s funerals as well, frankly.”

She has had to attend a few. After three years as Victoria’s commissioner for youth justice, Davidson was in November appointed the interim head of the state’s new violence reduction unit (VRU).

The unit was announced on the heels of a spike in youth offences and a series of high-profile violent incidents, including alleged knife fights between “rival youth gangs” at a major Melbourne shopping centre, and the stabbing deaths of 15-year-old Dau Akueng and 12-year-old Chol Achiek at Cobblebank in the city’s west.

But the VRU was in strange company.

It was launched alongside punitive law-and-order reforms that were widely criticised on human rights grounds, including bail measures and adult sentences for children as young as 14. The VRU, though, is not a law-and-order program: it views violence as a public health issue, which therefore requires a public health response.

The model has its origins in the work of Karyn McCluskey, a former police officer and nurse who established the first VRU in Scotland in 2003 – a time when Glasgow was known as the murder capital of the world. More than 20 years on – 14 with McCluskey helming the VRU – and the turnaround is stark: homicides, attempted murders and serious assaults plummeted and stayed low, and in 2024 the country removed its last youth from prison.

“We jailed lots of people, [and it] didn’t make any difference,” McCluskey tells the Guardian.

“If that worked, we’d have had no crime.”

Instead, she says, they “started talking about violence as a disease”: one that was caught by “being brought up in violent homes, whole communities where violence is prevalent”. They examined how violence spread, and how to treat it.

“That took us into that very preventive space,” McCluskey says.

McCluskey has been in Australia this week, speaking at violence reduction seminars, including the first held by Victoria’s VRU. She has been working closely with Davidson – whose appointment recently became permanent, with the program receiving a $30m funding boost – to establish the state scheme.

Points of interruption

The strategy is not to create a whole new layer of social services, but to slide into existing structures, such as schools and hospitals, with targeted and localised interventions.

Some of the earliest and most critical work in Scotland occurred not in justice centres but in hospitals. “They were the people who came forward first and said, ‘we’ve had enough’,” McCluskey says. “They were fantastic about giving us the information around what was happening.

“We had pubs and venues where violence was an issue and we didn’t know about them, so they were giving us details like that, but we were also picking up lots of tit-for-tat violence.”

That data was critical in helping to map violence that was not coming to the attention of police. It also highlighted a key opportunity for prevention – “a real point of interruption”, McCluskey says, when people turned up “with a stab wound in their arse … plotting their revenge”.

Davidson has drawn on this directly. She is putting the finishing touches on a program – the first of its kind in Australia – to embed youth workers and “lived experience” mentors into the Alfred and Royal Children’s hospitals to intervene when a young person is admitted with traumatic injuries from violence.

“What I saw as the commissioner for youth justice is every time a kid ends up in the justice system on a really heinous crime, you follow it back and they’ve had heinous crimes done to them,” Davidson says.

“So when a young person turns up to an emergency department or in a trauma ward, there will be an immediate response from a youth worker … rather than wait for them to retaliate, enact violence themselves and ultimately end up in the justice system.”

Another program, the first to roll out, put social workers in 23 schools where kids were deemed most at risk of turning to violence. Those schools were selected based on extensive data analysis to identify precisely where violence was originating, drawing on justice data, crime statistics, health information, school attendance rates, qualitative analysis from law enforcement, and postcode-level analyses of disadvantage.

“We need to think about how we tailor local, hyper-local responses,” Davidson says. “There’s some brilliant examples of that work in Scotland – I went into a couple of those housing estate-type locations where they had just turned it around statistically in five to 10 years.”

Post-election unknowns

The VRU’s remit is not just youth violence, though that has been its focus so far. Davidson says she is beginning to explore connections between adult homelessness and retail violence. It’s work that hints at the scale of some of the likely underlying problems: there are 189,536 people on Victoria’s public housing waitlist, and the median wait time is 10 months for those assessed as in greatest need.

But there’s a more immediate shadow looming over the nascent program: the November state election.

The government’s recent hardline moves on crime have been seen as an attempt by Labor to outflank the Liberal party on its own turf. With the VRU, the Labor government appears to be having a bet each way, bundling its preventive, restorative, public health approach in with punitive justice measures, and calling the program “serious consequences, early interventions”.

The state’s police commissioner, Mike Bush, appears to be walking a similar line, coming into the job a year ago with “a prevention mindset and a prevention focus”, while recently calling for mandatory minimum sentencing for youth offenders.

Davidson is diplomatic about these apparent contradictions. “We’re in an environment where these two [approaches] coexist,” she says. “I think it’s important to acknowledge that they’re on the same spectrum.”

Labor claims the Liberal party intends to axe the VRU if elected; the opposition declined to confirm or deny this when approached for comment by Guardian Australia.

Annual crime statistics released last month showed a drop in Victoria’s crime rate for the first time in four years, and a 6% reduction in youth crime. Labor has been quick to seize upon the figures, with the police minister, Anthony Carbines, claiming the hardline measures were responsible, while the minister for violence reduction, Sonya Kilkenny, said they reflected the impact of the VRU’s work.

McCluskey, though, insists against “short-termism”. There was a drop in the homicide rate the year after she established the VRU in Scotland. “People said, ‘you must be delighted, this is all working’, and we’re like, listen – it could be happenstance. You need to come back to us in five years’ time,” she says.

“You need to show them some metrics that you’re going in the right direction. That is true … But it also needs to be long term. You can’t achieve this in a short-term political cycle … you need a 10, 15 year plan.”

“It’s the approach that’s the focus for me,” says Davidson. “No matter who is in power, my interests remain the same.”