speakin’ o’ aaarrrrggghhhhhh! I thought the dear ol’ USA was…oh never mind…
Weeks…that’s in Brittain…
In the US the prevalence of guns means that there are fewer assaults and more murders. You have to survive the encounter to be the victim of assault.
Well,then, just another example of how the UN favors the US.
No doubt the US has more murders per capita than Scotland. I’m not sure that the US has so many murders that it is comparable to the per-capita figures for assault for Scotland. I’d love to see some actual data for both.
The article makes the point that telephone interviews suggest a rate of violent assualt 10 times greater than reported to the police. So, under their theory, at least, “official” assault numbers aren’t accurate. I’m not convinced a random sample of phone interviews is either. I know violent crime goes unreported, though, and would love to see the UN report firsthand, rathern than filtered through the news media.
i’m shocked..
AMAR… where’s your pink kitty tatoo??? 
Wales I can understand, but Scotland? 
Must be the sugar rush from all those deep-fried Mars bars. 
djm
Having recently read a history of the Scotts (In the steps of the Clansmen) I’m not surprized… seems like some things don’t change…
My antecedents.
I am quite surprised as well. I’m not sure why. I suppose I have a sort of fantasy vison of what Scotland is like, and never having been there, my mind does not think of it as a real place, with all the problems of any society. I hope BigDavy and Uilliam and kenny are okay! I did not know that there was “sectarian violence” in Scotland—I guess that means violence caused by religious differences. I thought that the clans were so utterly destroyed by the English that there would not be any violence relating to that sort of thing, if that is what you were saying anniemcu. But I know very little about it. I hope they can solve some of their problems for the sake of those getting hurt.
It doesn’t surprise me at all.
The binge drinking culture that exists in England, Scotland and Wales is a disgrace. If you have ever been out at night in Edinburgh, Newcastle, Manchester, London, or any other city across the UK, you will know the kind of atmosphere that pervades after the pubs close.
Mukade
The clan system was pretty much destroyed but the Gaelic culture survives and the project of converting the highlands to Calvinism was only partly successful. In general, the Northern Hebrides are predominently Protestant and the Southern Hebrides predominently Catholic. Many displaced highlanders ended up in Glasgow where there were already a great many Irish immigrants who went to Scotland looking for work. The intermarriage between Catholic highlanders and Irish immigrants means that there is a divide between Catholic Gaels and protestant Gaels reflected in the football teams they are likely to support.
That said, when Scotland plays England at football, internal sectarian differences tend to be forgotten. 
There is a major sectarian factor involved with this rivalry. Rangers are the Protestant team and Celtic are the Catholic team (yes, I know there are technicalities surrounding this but do you think the people using it as an excuse to batter each other have and knowledge of these technicalities? No, so shut it). This has deep historical roots, which I can’t be bothered explaining right now but basically what it means is that the fans of both clubs have a good reason to beat the crap out of each other at every opportunity.
If you ever have the misfortune of being in Glasgow on a match day, it is advisable to stay indoors for that whole day since it is likely outside you’ll find some extremely disgruntled fans of the losing team looking for a fight or some extremely drunk and happy fans of the winning team…looking for a fight.
How can you spot these people? Well it isn’t too hard. All celtic fans will be carrying Irish flags and wearing green, and all Ranger fans will be carrying Union flags or Red Hand of Ulster flags and wearing blue. Both sets of fans will generally be carrying buckfast and some may be carrying knives or screw-drivers or hammers. If you see any large groups of these people it is advisable to steer clear of them.
On non match days the only real perpetrators of sectarian violence are the neds who will swan around the city centre wearing either a Rangers top or a Celtic top looking for another ned with the opposing team’s top on, and call him either a ‘fenian bastard’ or an ‘orange prick’ before embarking on some knife crime. If you see any of these people, it is best to let them go about their business and view from afar. They are a novelty to observe but shouldn’t be approached.
from: http://www.glasgowsurvival.co.uk/culture/glaRangerCeltic.html
Brian I don’t know how you manage to come up with articles like this but anybody who would write the sentence I just quoted isn’t worth reading. Of course the rivalry has historical roots that are complicated and of course the protagonists know what they are. There are many mixed families too where there is sometimes tolerance and sometimes less violent feuding.
The advice that dork gives would be equally applicable if Manchester United came to town or any other well-supported UK soccer team. When football thugs are out on the town, stay well clear. When I lived in Oxford, one favouritie pub near the railway station would be boarded up on match days. We’d go in the back door after being peered at for recognition through a mailing shute.
As a Scot living in Scotland, I was incredulous when I listened to this on the radio. As they would say around here, it is a pile of steaming mince.
The cities in Scotland are like any city anywhere, violence is only normally a factor if you are male, between 16 and 25 and is usually drink related. If you do not fit into this category then you will be (un)lucky to see any violence, let alone be a victim.
Cynth: we are all ok here, this is a mountain being made out of a molehill. Uillium busks at the Celtic games, maybe he can tell a few stories.
David
A UNITED Nations report has labelled Scotland the most violent country in the developed world…
When did the UN start recognising Scotland as being a country?
Thanks Weeks - It’s interesting to see this thread this morning since I’m also reading an Ian Rankin paperback. The description below is from a web site on contemporary writers. Several Irish/English/Scottish crime fiction writers are far ahead of their US contemporaries in examining the dark side of modern culture.
“Tartan Noir” :roll:
Near the opening of his debut appearance in Knots and Crosses (1987), Detective Sergeant John Rebus visits his brother, who remarks about a series of abductions of young girls, ‘You never think of that sort of thing happening in Edinburgh, do you?’, and Rebus replies: ‘There’s more happening in Edinburgh than anyone knows’. It is an ominous exchange, which sets up the plot efficiently and lays open the home territory of Ian Rankin’s best-selling detective fiction series: fourteen books so far including the latest, A Question of Blood (2003). Rebus competes with P.D. James’s Wexford and Colin Dexter’s Morse for the title of Britain’s favourite fictional detective: his adventures have even created their own genre, so-called ‘Tartan Noir’. The early ‘Rebus’ novels are short and tightly plotted, if somewhat formulaic, as they move towards their solutions. As the series has progressed, the novels have grown in complexity, social scope and literary quality, their atmosphere ever darker, as in the best of them such as Black and Blue (1997) and The Falls (2001). What they also develop superbly is the personality and background of the detective himself. Rebus - swiftly promoted to Inspector rank, but perennially under suspension or suspicion by his bosses - is a world-weary tough-guy Scottish cop, who lives up to his name (a ‘rebus’ being an enigmatic puzzle). He and his partners invariably have to work out cryptic clues to solve the case. Rebus himself is as ready with a blackly humorous aside as he is with a gloomy rumination about Scotland.
What really makes the books distinctive is the Edinburgh setting. Behind architectural elegance, monuments and tourist traps, the city’s human history awaits. Standing in Greyfriars Kirkyard during The Falls, Rebus feels that ‘Edinburgh seemed always to have thrived on cruelty … its centuries of barbarism masked by an exterior by turns douce and strict’. The city’s lawyers, politicians and rich businessmen co-exist in Rebus’s world with a thriving underworld of gangsters, petty criminals, and delinquent youths tempted in from surrounding sink estates. The books register continual routine investigations into drug smuggling, robbery, assault, arson and shootings; Rebus’s speciality is the baffling murder, his classic antagonist the serial killer. Their impact depends on psychology as much as topography. To Rebus, Edinburgh is ‘a state of mind’: hidden secrets, fears, violence, and danger lurk in alleyways, behind the smart Georgian façade of the New Town and the Scottish Parliament; even below its street surface, where corpses are discovered, atrocities and fights to the death take place.
http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth02A17M435212626443#criticalperspective
It’s good to hear the input of someone who actually lives there, thanks David!
It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that, statistically speaking, the violence supposedly reported is demographically oriented in the fashion that David speaks of…when you study violent crime of any sort, you learn that all types of crime follow very specific victim profiles…(you see, criminals and law enforcement officers have the same talents of hunting and profiling, whether they realise it or not; the function of profiling a victim stimulates the same portions of the human brain that the function of profiling and hunting for a criminal does also…); if you participate in certain activities, you are more likely to expereince certain types of crime, if you live or work in certain areas you are more likely to be the victim or participate in other types of crime, etc…
For example…when I lived in B.C., for a time I resided in a city called Surrey, just outside Vancouver. In certain areas of Surrey (unfortunatly where I lived, in the burrough of Whalley) you could, now and again, hear gunshots at night…now, this scared the hell out of me for a while until some neighbors enlightened me as to what was going on. Those gunshots were the east Indian gangs fighting… No non-Indian descended Canadian had ever reported being wounded by a gun in that area, though there were more often than not gunshot wounds inflicted on young men of Indian descent, regardless of whether or not they were actually in a gang or not. You weren’t at all likely to be involved in a shooting unless you were a male of Indian descent (Now before anyone starts screaming about racial profiling let me just say that this was quite disturbing for me nonetheless, because I had friends of East Indian descent that I worried for. If any of you have ever had contact with people of Indian culture, you know what kind, gentle, sweet and friendly people they can be… Some of their kids just go bad…just like any other race, and get involved in illegal activity.) This has been a few years ago, and things may have changed for the better or for the worse, but this is just a microcosmic example of how certain types of crime follow certain lifestyles or activities, and sadly, even races.
So long story short, I would wager, until more accurate polls and/or tests come out, that most of the violence reported fits into one type or few types of demographic that exist inside the regular strata of the Scottish community, and their activities and personal choices have, in part, large or small, dictated the crime they experience. I also dont think that the telephone polls reflect the proper random sampling that is needed for a survey of this nature…When I was in school, one of our assignments was to try to conduct a crime survey. It’s a lot harder than it would seem… No one seemed to really want to talk about crime they’ve expereinced, even with a civie. The one trend that startled me (and this was one that I had just found out on my own, so of course, actual mileage may vary)was that there were a great deal of people who were addmitted inflictors of violence that liked to brag about the violence they had inflicted or the violence that had been inflicted apon them…IMHO, there may be a little of this type of phenominon influencing the “poll” in Scottland, especially if the footballers are as violent as people describe…Also, IMHO, a proper poll of this kind should take into account the more violent extra curricular activities that go on, or regular violence that accompanies other activities, whether directly involved with the activity or not. This type of violence/crime should then be seperated into their own respective and appropriate category instead of being lumped into larger categories of crime. For example, and this may or not effect the poll, all violence related to football matches are lumped into a category and seperated from crime that was incidental to the day, not the football match.
IMHO again, and this is a very simplistic way of going about it (but without going into a disertation, simplicity is neccesary), if crime were seperated more categorically than it already is, the poll might reflect a more accurate sample of violent crime in Scottland…
but then again, I may be wrong…just an idea.
asult stats for the us 7.56 per 1000 and the uk 7.46 per 1000 canada 7.11 per 1000 asults.
muder stats in the us .04 per 1000 uk and canada .01 per 1000
Thanks. That kind of shores up the point I was making. Simon seems to be saying that US has so many more murders because of guns that it makes a big dent in the assault statistics. I don’t think that’s really true.
Compare and contrast:
US murders per 100000: 4. Assaults per 100000 = 756
UK murders per 100000: 1. Assaults per 100000 = 746
Really, I don’t see how Simon’s premise follows based upon these numbers. Especially when comparing to the UN report, which says (though I am aware that the methodology is of debatable value) that there are about 104,000 violent attacks a year in Scotland, which translates to
Scotland assults per 100000 = over 2100.
If you take the 4 US murders and pretend that the victims survived, and throw those numbers over into the “assault” column, it doesn’t significantly affect the comparison between the numbers.
Granted, I’m also comparing the UN’s phone interview statistics for Scotland to your website’s statistics for the US and UK, while I’d much rather compare from the same source for better validity (since the UN report includes unreported crime, and the official stastics of course do not). The article did mention they surveyed 21 countries, so we have at least a good comparitive analysis of “how many people will admit to being victims of violence over the phone”. How that compares to actual levels of violence, I lack the expertise to say.