Public Health Approaches to Targeted Violence Prevention
Over the past several decades, public health professionals have been developing the public health approach to targeted violence prevention. The Centers for Disease Control defines public health as “The collective actions and strategies of a society to improve population health.”
For mental health specialists, we want to share more about what public health approaches to violence prevention have achieved in adjacent fields. We believe this information can help to inform our work in targeted violence prevention, as the field of targeted violence prevention is still emerging.
Youth Violence
One example approach comes from the 1980s with a focus on youth violence. Deborah Prothrow-Stith, Howard Spivak, Alice Hausman (1987) wrote:
“When violence is viewed as a learned response to environmental sources of stress, educational strategies can be used to change that response to a more positive one. Preventing violence on a large, public scale involves broad-based implementation of individual-level education on alternative conflict resolution techniques concurrent with community-level outreach and education addressing the attitudes and beliefs that foster violent behavior.”
This approach can also involve efforts to diminish environmental sources of stress, such as through primary or secondary public health prevention interventions.
Gender-Based Violence
Another area comes from the large body of work that has been focused on gender-based violence. Howard Spivak, E. Lynn Jenkins, Kristi VanAudenhove, Debbie Lee, Mim Kelly, John Iskander wrote (2014):
“The problem of IPV can only be addressed if the focus is shifted from responding to acts of violence to preventing violence before it starts. This will require the involvement of many key sectors, including education, the media, housing and community development, criminal justice, transportation, and private industry. Public health entities and State Domestic Violence Coalitions have a history of being effective champions of multidisciplinary and multi-sector initiatives. Ultimately, rigorous evaluation of the outcomes of prevention efforts makes it possible to determine the long-term impact on population health, inform policy decisions, and build effective strategies to prevent IPV.”
Community-Based Violence
NGOs have been very involved in the space of community-based violence prevention, such as Cure Violence. Gary Slutkin wrote:
“The health sectors have an impressive global record of effective prevention, changing behaviors and shifting norms, even with the most difficult-to-reach populations. Public health approaches are effective at changing even deep and long-standing behaviors such as unhealthy sexual behavior or family burial practices. Considering violent behavior, the health sector must be deployed in a similar way to identify individuals, groups and organizations who may become or are violent, reach them through people they deeply trust, help them deal with whatever drives their unhealthy behavior, and change the social and other pressures.”