Violence in America - A new look at origins and solutions

Violence operates like an infectious disease. This understanding of violence allows for the use of proven public health techniques to drastically reduce violence.

In this presentation, we will examine the public health perspective on the causes of violent behavior. This will include a discussion of the transmission of violence to individuals through modeling, norms, and trauma; the interconnectedness of different types of violence, so that exposure to one type of violence can affect your subsequent likelihood of being violent in different forms; and recent advancements in neuroscience, behavioral science, and epidemiology regarding how individuals exposed to violence are effected by it.

We will offer a national solution to this violence by identifying the characteristics of a comprehensive public health approach to violence in the United States. This solution is based on decades of work in the prevention of other infectious diseases such as AIDS, tuberculosis, and cholera and has been piloted, tested and honed for the past decade to effectively reduce community violence. The elements of this solution include establishing a system of detection and interruption of ongoing conflicts; identifying and changing the thinking of the highest risk; and using community norms and social pressure to prevent the use of violence.

While this proposed solution has been successful in preventing community violence, it has not been deployed to address mass-shootings such as the incident in Sandy Hook. We will discuss way in which this model can be adapted to address mass-shooting events and other types of violence as well.