Citation

Eisenman DP, Flavahan L. Int. Rev. Psychiatry 2017; 29(4): 341-349.

Affiliation

b Health and Medicine Division, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine , Washington DC , USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/09540261.2017.1343527

PMID

28805121

Abstract

This paper asks what programmes and policies for preventing violent extremism (also called 'countering violent extremism', or CVE) can learn from the public health violence prevention field. The general answer is that addressing violent extremism within the wider domain of public health violence prevention connects the effort to a relevant field of research, evidence-based policy and programming, and a broader population reach. This answer is reached by examining conceptual alignments between the two fields at both the case-level and the theoretical level. To address extremist violence within the wider reach of violence prevention, having a shared model is seen as a first step. The World Health Organization uses the social-ecological framework for assessing the risk and protective factors for violence and developing effective public-health based programmes. This study illustrates how this model has been used for gang violence prevention and explores overlaps between gang violence prevention and preventing violent extremism. Finally, it provides policy and programme recommendations to align CVE with public health violence prevention.

Language: en

Keywords

Terrorism; extremism; gang violence; public health; violence; violence prevention