Join Prof Iain Brennan to explore focused deterrence and the evaluation of America’s most successful violence intervention in England.

Professor Brennan will present “Focused deterrence: Evaluating America's most successful violence intervention in an English context”, exploring the implementation and evaluation of focused deterrence in five cities in England.

Date: Wednesday, 7 October 2026

Time: 4:00-5:00 pm

Venue: Roscoe Theatre B, The University of Manchester

Free event; Registration required.

The seminar is open to staff, students, and anyone interested in criminology, violence prevention, and criminal justice. The seminar will be chaired by Dr David Buil-Gil from the Department of Criminology.

About the talk

Focused deterrence seeks to prevent violence using a combination of deterrence, social support and the leveraging of community norms of non-violence. Systematic reviews, almost exclusively based on US studies, have consistently declared its effectiveness. While the generalisability of these findings to other countries is unknown, focused deterrence has been recommended for managing the most serious community violence in the UK. In order to address the gap in knowledge, our team were commissioned by Youth Endowment Fund to evaluate focused deterrence in five cities in England. This evaluation - a realist, multi-centred randomised controlled trial - has become one of the largest violence trials ever undertaken. In this talk, with impact results still pending, I will document our team's experience of this project. In so doing, I will also discuss the problems with 'looking west' for ideas on violence prevention, the limitations and limits of randomised trials for community violence prevention, and the challenges of delivering a five-year evaluation.

About the speaker

Iain Brennan is a Professor of Criminology at the School of Criminology, Politics and Law of the University of Hull, a chartered research psychologist and the University's Institutional Lead for Open Research.

Iain's research interests are in violence prevention including weapon-carrying, serious violence and domestic abuse. He is particularly interested in evaluating interventions in these areas and has led many evaluation studies incorporating randomised controlled trials, quasi-experimental designs and process evaluations.

He is an adviser on violence prevention to local and national governmental and non-governmental organisations including Home Office, Youth Endowment Fund, College of Policing, National Police Chiefs' Council and police forces across the UK.

He has been a principal or co-investigator on more than 20 funded research projects worth over £8m from funders including ESRC, Home Office, ADR-UK, NPCC, Jacobs Foundation and the European Commission. He is currently principal investigator on several research projects including the UK's largest-ever community violence trial, funded by Youth Endowment Fund.

He is the author of over 60 journal articles, reports, chapters and books, an editor of British Journal of Criminology and an ADR-UK Ambassador.

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