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Abstract
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The Violence Prevention Project is a community-based outreach and education project directed toward reducing the negative social and medical outcomes of violence among adolescents. Community agency personnel are trained to work with youth on issues of anger and conflict resolution. A mass media campaign advertises the issue to the broader population. Interventions, such as the Violence Prevention Project, can use the public health strategies to increase awareness of the problem and associated risk factors, provide alternative conflict resolution techniques, and generate a new community ethos around violence. This approach holds great promise in an area in which after-the-fact legislative and punitive interventions have not worked.
VioLit summary:
OBJECTIVE:
The purpose of this article by Spivak et al. was to describe the Violence Prevention Project, a multifaceted program which seeks to educate and work with the community on issues of anger and conflict resolution from a public health perspective.
METHODOLOGY:
This study was a non-experimental description of the Violence Prevention Project, based in Boston. This description included the discussion of the background literature behind key components of the program, a description of its public health approach to violence prevention, and discussion of plans for evaluation and of the limitations of the program.
FINDINGS/DISCUSSION:
The authors identified the problem with violence prevention as the focus on adolescent violence through the criminal justice and legal fields which use threat of punishment as deterrence and rehabilitation as a secondary intervention. These approaches, they argued, are after the fact; the key is to identify risk factors that precede violence. These risk factors they identified as poverty, adolescence, gender (being male), and abuse. Race is not included as a risk factor because the relationship between violence and race disappears when poverty is taken into account. The Violence Prevention Project was designed to incorporate a public health model approach to preventing violence. This program has taken a learning approach to violence and approaches violence in the context of learned response to stress from the environment. As such, prevention strategies would include risk communication and behavior modification techniques which would increase awareness of violent contexts and situations and provide alternative strategies for decreasing risk factors and coping with risky situations.
The purpose of this paper was to describe an alternative approach to violence prevention as embodied in the Violence Prevention Project. The Violence Prevention Project has incorporated a community-based program directed at both individual and community levels in Boston. At the individual level, a violence prevention curriculum with the goal of instilling both a nonviolent ethos in the classroom and alternative responses to anger has been instituted in high schools. Early indicators revealed that this program has had some success. This curriculum was also presented in less traditional settings in the community such as alternative schools, recreational programs, public housing developments, and so forth and from nontraditional sources such as police and clergy. Community agency providers are also trained in education. A second individual approach was to increase and better prepare support agencies to better cope with youth who were already exhibiting violent behavior. The clinical treatment portion of secondary intervention was designed to draw patients from hospitals and other medical sources and provide broad-based care through the hospital and community delivery sites. Finally, at the community level, a mass media campaign was instituted to raise awareness and provide a supportive environment for nonviolence. Overall, the authors have predicted that this type of program based on prevention of the violent occurrence rather than treating it after-the-fact will be successful in lowering violence rates. Assessment will include a multi-methodological approach involving quasi-experimental designs to determine the effect of the project at all levels, surveys to measure impact on attitudes and knowledge, and interviews with adolescents at specific test sites. Assessment of impact of intervention on behavior will be done with analysis of data on assaults from police, suspension data from the school, and intentional injuries from hospital data.
AUTHORS' RECOMMENDATIONS:
After assessment, the authors will be more able to specifically recommend the areas of the program that work and do not work, but the contention was made that a public health and community-integrated approach was the best one to make for the prevention of violence.
EVALUATION:
The authors raise two very important issues concerning the limitation of the program. The first is the general support violence receives from the public as a way to cope with problems. This point cannot be underscored enough. What they refer to as "swimming against the tide" (210) may be more like crashing against rocks. The program, though, attempts to address this issue through community education efforts and mass media campaigns that reveal the health and social dangers of promoting violence. It is uncertain how much help this will be in turning attitudes toward nonviolent resolution strategies. Much of the program's curriculum is geared toward the adolescents, but positive effects may be diffused when the adolescents return home to parents who still believe in violence. The second issue the authors raise is the lack of advocacy base; it is still largely the poor who are victimized by violence, and those with resources do not get involved in an issue until it directly affects them. With proper education of the public, this may not be nearly as difficult as changing our cultural base. This is an ambitious project. The sketchy outline of evaluation of the program is extensive in itself. More detail in this evaluation plan would be useful. Despite the thoroughness of the project, there are still two nagging issues remaining. First, though the authors identify four risk factors (poverty, adolescence, abuse, and being male), the program really only addresses adolescence directly. The mass media campaign will touch on the underlying issues of violence that permeate abuse, but what of poverty and male culture? This leads to the second issue: how does one confront subcultural issues that confound the context of violence? The authors briefly mention culture but do not fully address it. Also, if poverty is a risk factor, what should we do about alleviating it? Again, this is not addressed. The program described is ambitious and has tried to attend to as many facets of violence as possible. Clearly, it represents one of the best attempts yet at preventing violence. (CSPV Abstract - Copyright © 1992-2007 by the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence, Institute of Behavioral Science, Regents of the University of Colorado)
KW - Massachusetts
KW - Conflict Resolution
KW - Public Health Approach
KW - Public Health Prevention
KW - Prevention Program
KW - Violence Prevention
KW - Juvenile Violence
KW - Juvenile Offender
KW - Community Based
KW - Curriculum
KW - Anger Management
KW - Juvenile Anger
KW - Program Description
Language: en |