The Glasgow miracle? Storytelling, violence reduction and public policy
| Published date | 01 August 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13624806231208432 |
| Author | Alistair Fraser,Fern Gillon |
| Date | 01 August 2024 |
The Glasgow miracle?
Storytelling, violence reduction
and public policy
Alistair Fraser
University of Glasgow, UK
Fern Gillon
University of Glasgow, UK
Abstract
The city of Glasgow, once dubbed the ‘murdercapitalof Europe’, has more recentlybecome
famed for its experiments in violence reduction. In this article, based on a large-scale study
of violence reduction, we focus on the discursive construction of this so-called ‘Glasgow
miracle’. Based on interviews with 40 senior stakeholders working in Scotland during the
period 2000–2020, we explore the significance of dramatic personal stories of tragedy,
redemption, and rebirth in shifting the public narrative around violence. In so doing, we con-
tribute new empirical and theoretical evidence to narrative criminology, demonstrate the
conditions under which progressive policies can come to the fore, and interrogate the
role of storytellers in communicating these stories with persuasion and influence.
Keywords
Bourdieu, narrative criminology, policy mobility, Scotland, social transformation, violence
Introduction
The city of Glasgow, Scotland, is founded on the legend of St Mungo, who reputedly per-
formed four miracles on the banks of the Molendinar Burn in the sixth century. His feats
Corresponding author:
Alistair Fraser, School of Social and Political Sciences & Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research,
University of Glasgow, Ivy Lodge, 63 Gibson Street, Glasgow, G12 8LR, UK.
Email: Alistair.Fraser@Glasgow.ac.uk
Article
Theoretical Criminology
2024, Vol. 28(3) 328–345
© The Author(s) 2023
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/13624806231208432
journals.sagepub.com/home/tcr
are immortalized in the city’s coat of arms, as well as the famous lines by the Scots poet
Edwin Morgan: The bird that never flew/The tree that never grew/The bell that never
rang/The fish that never swam. Storytelling and mythology remain central to the city’s
character but in more recent times, these urban legends relate less to the resurrection
of animal and plant matter and more to the rejuvenation of the city’s reputation.
Glasgow has long held an image as a ‘Scottish Chicago’(Davies, 2007) or ‘murder
capital of Europe’(McKay, 2006), with popular representations frequently portraying
‘afilthy, slum-ridden, poverty-stricken, gang-infested city’(Damer, 1990: 5). In 2004,
the United Nations announced that Scotland had the highest rates of violence in the devel-
oped world, and the World Health Organization found the city to have the top homicide
rate in 21 European countries (Krug et al., 2002).
1
The reputation, it seemed, was sealed.
In the years that followed, however, a remarkable transformation occurred. Since
2006/2007, police recorded crime statistics have shown a 48% decrease in non-sexual
violent crime (Scottish Government, 2016, 2018), including a 38% fall in homicide
and 43% fall in attempted murder and serious assault. The dramatic reduction has, by
and large, been attributed to the work of Scotland’s Violence Reduction Unit (VRU), a
small team of police officers and analysts tasked with reducing the epidemic levels of
knife crime and homicide. Through a programme of direct intervention, policy lobbying,
and practical influence, the Scottish VRU promoted principles of prevention and educa-
tion over policing and justice, advocating for a broader ‘public health’approach to vio-
lence reduction.
2
Though the precise causal mechanisms are debatable—and follow a
pattern of crime reduction in North America and Europe (McVie, 2017)—this has not
prevented a consensus of cause and effect. Like the New York miracle before
(Zimring, 2007), which led to the exportation of the ‘broken windows’model of policing,
the dramatic reduction has led to policy transfer of the ‘Glasgow model’to England and
Wales through the funding of 20 new regional VRUs.
In this article, based on a study of violence reduction in Scotland and England, we
focus on the discursive construction of the so-called ‘Glasgow miracle’and interrogate
the role of storytelling and narrative in its constitution. Based on interviews with 40
senior stakeholders working in Scotland during the period 2000–2020—including
senior politicians, civil servants, police officers and community leaders—we explore
the significance of dramatic personal stories of redemption and hope, relayed by charis-
matic storytellers, in shifting the public narrative around violence. In so doing, we seek to
contribute to narrative approaches to criminology (Fleetwood et al., 2019), analyse the
conditions under which progressive policies regarding violence prevention can come
to the fore (Polletta, 2006), and interrogate the performative role of storytellers
(Bauman, 1986) in communicating these stories with persuasion and influence.
The article makes three primary arguments. First, drawing on interview data, the
article makes an empirical case for the significance of storytelling and narrative in the dis-
cursive reconstruction of Glasgow during the period 2000–2020. For reasons of space in
this article, we centre one specific example: David’s story. This instance of storytelling,
as we shall see, played an outsized role in the reframing of violence in Scotland and war-
rants close investigation. Second, drawing on cultural sociology, we argue for the signifi-
cance of local and national context, which contain within them a deep reservoir of cultural
myths, in evaluating audience receptiveness to particular narratives. The telling of
Fraser and Gillon329
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