Scotland was the 'murder capital of Europe'. Then it started treating violence like a disease - BBC

In the early 2000s you were more three times more likely to be assaulted in Scotland than in the US. But when the Scottish authorities started looking at violent crime as a public health problem, levels plummeted and the country now ranks among some of the safest in the world.

It was no ordinary day in court. There was no jury, no witnesses or defendants at Glasgow Sheriff Court on 24 October 2008. Instead, in front of the judge, who was dressed in full regalia, were 85 rival gang members from the east end of Glasgow, Scotland's biggest city.

For decades, the area had been plagued by territorial youth gangs, organised crime and fights over drugs and weapons, with knife crime an almost daily occurrence.

Despite their ongoing feuds, the assembled gang members fell silent as they were addressed in turn by a range of speakers. A mother described seeing her son's unrecognisable face after a gang-related machete attack at age 13. An American basketball player recalled losing his brother to gun violence. Doctors and surgeons described brutal lacerations and permanent disfigurements.

The message was clear: the violence has to stop.

"If I was the chief constable [of Strathclyde Police], I probably wouldn't have let us do that," reflects Karyn McCluskey, co-founder and former director of the Scottish Violence Reduction Unit (SVRU), a specialist unit set up by the police in 2005 and extended into a nationwide initiative the following year by the Scottish government. The unit was behind the unusual spectacle of that day.

"He must have thought we were bonkers," she says. "That day, we had police horses at the court, boats going up and down the [river] Clyde, because it was a really risky thing to do. But there was a permissiveness around trying to do something."

That something seemed to work. The gang members in attendance were given a number to call afterwards for support if they wanted to end their involvement in violence; after 10 similar sessions attended by 473 young people, almost 400 of them had called it.

The courtroom intervention was the first of what would be called Scotland's "self-referral sessions", part of the country's efforts to curb record rates of violence which plagued the nation, and particularly Glasgow.

Between 2003-2005, the city had the highest murder rate of any in Europe. The United Nations declared Scotland the most violent country in the developed world, with Scots almost three times as likely to be assaulted as Americans. Newspapers were routinely filled with reports of gruesome murders and bloody gang fights.

Over the following decade, the homicide rate would fall by 56% in Glasgow and 38% in Scotland more widely. Violent crime as a whole declined by almost a third across the country between 2006 and 2015. Today the number of homicides in Scotland is at its lowest level in over 20 years. Numbers of serious assaults and attempted murders have undergone a similar decline.

While the statistics hide the individual stories of tragedy and horror of any violent crime, it is still a remarkable turnaround.

Scotland now ranks somewhere in the middle of European countries for murders, with lower levels per capita than the likes of Sweden, France or England and Wales. How did a nation once beleaguered by knives, gangs and slayings make such a decisive change?

In short, it changed the way it saw violence as a problem – shifting it from being solely a criminal justice issue to one that was also about public health.

"Scotland had the image [in the early 2000s] of the hard, drunk man and a particular reputation for gang activity and knife crime that had been there for generations, all the way back to 18th-Century razor gangs," says Will Linden, deputy director at the SVRU and one of its first employees. In 2003, Linden was working as a police analyst under McCluskey, then Head of Intelligence Analysis for Strathclyde Police, when their department was asked to produce a report on reducing homicide figures.

"When we looked at the data, there was a realisation that most homicides were almost happenstance," Linden says. "They weren't preplanned or connected to organised crime, it was usually just a couple of people getting involved in a fight where one pulls out a knife and stabs the other. We started to see that you couldn't have a strategy for dealing with homicide without looking at violence in its entirety and not just at policing."