Handbook of Crime Prevention and Community Safety 518 Chapter 19 Violent and sexual crime Mike Maguire and Fiona Brookman Introduction Looked at globally, both the scale and the range of ‘violent and sexual crime’ are immense. Quite apart from the millions of isolated acts of violence and sexual abuse that appear in official crime statistics, large numbers of people are killed, injured, abused or exploited in clearly criminal acts (though they are rarely recorded as such) associated with political conflicts, terrorism, the ‘war on terror’, despotic governments, civil wars, organized crime and so on. It is not difficult to find recent examples of large-scale atrocities against civilians: mass rape, trafficking in human beings, slavery and even genocide. Violence against women within the household is also widespread – and even culturally acceptable – in many societies. Clearly, at least in the foreseeable future, the prospects of a significant reduction in the totality of violence are remote. Inasmuch as plausible strategies can be formulated, they require expertise in fields such as international politics, human rights law or anti-poverty action. Even if we had such expertise (which we do not), it would be foolish to attempt to cover the whole picture in one short chapter, and the discussion here will be restricted to territory more familiar to criminologists. Nevertheless, it is important to remain aware of the broader picture, and that the kinds of preventive strategies most commonly discussed or evaluated within the criminological literature are relevant only to a fraction of the overall problem of violence. 1 Whilst not losing sight of the wider context, then, this chapter will be structured mainly around a more conventional understanding of the range of behaviour covered by the term ‘violent and sexual crime’ – in essence, the kinds of interpersonal offences routinely dealt with by the police and courts in the developed western world. Even limited in this way, the prevention (or reduction 2 ) of violent and sexual crime presents difficult and complex challenges. The nature, circumstances and locations of offences vary widely, as do the motives of those who commit them. They are often committed on the spur of the moment, and a high proportion involve people without a previous