Safety in Scotland

The level of social deprivation (hence leading to higher levels of violent crimes) is quite astounding here. It seems to be fairly widespread, especially in the west. It goes hand in hand with extremely high levels of chronic disease, unhealthy lifestyles, people working too much to make ends meet or not working at all and short life expectancy. Except if you are lucky enough to be born into wealth and a privileged post code. I didn't believe all this when I first heard it but have heard it from so many experts now have studied it and seen the effects myself that I wished i'd been aware of these trends when I first got here, I may not have stayed tho! i used to feel quite safe but not now. I think the level of safety here is a product of firstly low economic status but also of the added recession superimposed on top of that. Media are feeding us a lot of negative material tho and it is hard to know if things are any worse than years ago. I have had more actual personal threats in other countries. But people are generally pretty helpful also and friendly with a strong sense of duty toward family and strangers also to a degree. Don't ever ask someone to stop smoking around a bus stop tho (even if you have a child with you) or where there are other people gathered or have to walk thru/by, people get very defensive about that (their right to smoke)  and why you are here taking their jobs. High level of  crime also linked to lack of community cohesiveness.....there's quite a few reasons or causes and most stem back to government policy, or lack of regarding health and social deprivation...........o and then there's the football! but that's just an outlet for alcohol fuelled aggression and frustration and sectarian bigotry. The reasons behind these are the worrying things and will take a lot of resources and time to change. There are nice bits of Scotland too in the pricier areas usually but it's certainly not those bits we hear about. Partly due to the media.

Sounds like America, just honest enough to tell you that you don't have a right to tell them not to smoke.

We asked the exact same question before moving here. We were moving from a suburb of Nashville to a similarly sized suburb of Glasgow, but we'd heard so many stories of just how dangerous Glasgow really is, so we looked up the stats:

For 2012, the numbers were dead even: Nashville, TN is about the same size as Glasgow (600,000 ish) and had the exact same number of murders. As all of Scotland. The entire 5,000,000 ish population of the entire nation had as many murders as lil' old Nashville.

I didn't say Detroit (lived there) or Memphis (lived there), but even a relatively safe American city is more dangerous than the whole country. And it feels like it too. We have to constantly remind our children that crimes still happen, and if you refuse to be safe, your crime rate will be 100%.