ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the relationship between homicide and other forms of nonlethal violence in Scotland. As such, the demographic and temporal similarities between homicide and violence suggested that these two crimes should be considered as the same underlying behaviour, differentiated in outcome rather than process. Even though the research examining similarities between homicide and violence is scarce, many studies still make assumptions about this relationship. Studies examining the lethality of violence assume an underlying relationship between the two crimes since this type of analysis postulates that the characteristics of the incidents are similar enough to be comparable. Some theories assume that homicide is decreasing along with other forms of crime, including violence. These theories include the security hypothesis and the debut crime hypothesis. However, in contrast to the homicide dataset, the within-level in the violence data was constituted by the incidents and summarised offender variables, whereas the between-level was constituted by the victim variables.
