This chapter presents a new conceptual framework for understanding how adversity and trauma contribute to serious and violent offending. Synthesising insights from criminology, psychology and public health, it introduces a deprivation-based model focusing on five domains: safety, support, alternatives, responses and meaning. The chapter leverage existing theory but also critiques those such as General Strain and Social Information Processing models for failing to sufficiently capture the social and relational dimensions of trauma. It proposes an integrative ‘Deprivation Theory’ to explain why trauma clusters in justice populations and to illustrate how the prevention of serious and violent crime is everyone’s business. This theoretical contribution proposes that serious and violent crime is a failure of providing safety, offering support, providing alternatives and resourcing services. This conceptual framework of deprivation provides a structured way to inform research, policy and intervention related to the prevention of serious and violent crime.