Professor Anne-Marie Kilday
Professor Anne-Marie Kilday is Vice-Chancellor of the University of Northampton and the UK’s first professor of criminal history.
Scotland has long had the reputation of being a violent nation and our people have certainly been portrayed that way by forms of popular media. Numerous feature films, television dramas and fictional literature depict Scotland as crime ridden, the Scottish people as thrawn, hard and overlywas not significant or sustained over time, and indeed, that the rate of serious violent offending shrank. Instances of serious or fatal interpersonal violence (such as homicide, robbery or assault) were relatively uncommon from the 17th century until the millennium and the same was true of felonious property offences. Even levels of recidivism, or repeat-offending, which was seen as something of a gauge for how violent a country was, was relatively unusual amongst Scottish convicts. The notion of the Scots as a historically violent people is not borne out by the judicial evidence. The true history of crime in Scotland after 1600 was not particularly exceptional.
