Violence is preventable not inevitable

The World Health Organisation held the 3rd milestones meeting for its global campaign for violence prevention at the Scottish Police College in Fife last week. Scotland is one of the very few countries in the world to have adopted the WHO framework for violence prevention, which emphasises violence as a major public health issue, while in many countries the enormous medical, social and economic costs of violence are only now being recognized. In 2006 the Scottish Executive joined with the Violence Reduction Unit of the Strathclyde police to provide a holistic approach to the problem through a national action plan involving education, justice, health, security and economic sectors in addressing underlying causes of violence for a a safer Scotland. (more...)

The global campaign was launched in Bogotá, Colombia in 2002 to coincide with the publication of the World Report on Violence and Health. Five years later after a number of high-level statements and resolutions, focal point meetings, consultations and research, the focus of the Fife conference was on “getting serious about violence prevention” – on what remains to be done, scaling up pilot initiatives, international support and producing visible results. A particular discussion area was how to engage development agencies, governments and non-governmental organisations in violence prevention programmes. From Brazil to Thailand, pilot projects have shown that prevention works. International information exchange helps, for example, through a series of fact-sheets from the Violence Prevention Alliance working group on youth violence, alcohol and nightlife coordinated by the centre for public health at Liverpool John Moores University. Another initiative starts even earlier, nourishing the roots of empathy with pre-school and primary age children in a classroom programme developed by Mary Gordon for multicultural communities in Canada and now being piloted internationally. The Respect project managed by Murray Mallee Community Health Service in South Australia has mainstreamed violence prevention into all areas of its work with rural, farming, migrant and aboriginal communities.

The WHO highlights the fact that violence in society particularly affects women and children (as we have covered on oD this year) as well as being closely linked with increasing militarism, fundamentalism and the global arms trade. So let’s hope that our new PM, with his antecedents from north of the border, will take a leaf out of Scotland’s violence prevention action plan and not only apply the concept more widely in the UK but also promote it in European and international forums.