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Prevention The Violence Prevention Consortium is dedicated to the prevention of interpersonal violence, including family violence (child, partner, and elder abuse); sexual assault; youth violence; gang and gun violence; and hate crimes. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (1993) clearly stated the challenge: “Traditionally, our society has taught us that violence often equals courage and strength. We must unlearn this tragic lesson. If we are to survive as healthy, responsible, and caring people, we must teach ourselves and our children that violence does not solve problems.” Violence prevention must approach all levels of society--individual, peer, family, school and community--using strategies that have promise or a proven chance of success. Education is one of the key strategies for prevention; however, comprehensive, multi-faceted approaches are required because of the complex nature of violence. The Prevention Institute has created a framework for the range of prevention needed, called the Spectrum of Prevention. This follows the public health approach that insists that community education, policy and legislative changes, environmental change, fostering coalitions and networks, and strengthening individual knowledge and skills are all essential prevention strategies. The Violence Prevention Consortium exists in Hawaii to address this broad framework by improving communication and coordination and to work across professional fields—government, private agencies, businesses and with individual citizens. References: National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. The Prevention of Youth Violence: A Framework for Community Action. Atlanta, GA: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1993. We have much to learn about the causes of violence in American society and the toll it takes personally and on the greater society. Increasingly, social scientists, practitioners, and other professionals have gained knowledge and experience to identify the strategies that are more likely to succeed. Although using indicators of societal change are far from perfect, the prevention and interventions in use today demand rigorous review including analyses of key indicators. Likewise, the Consortium and the community should be able to measure how well the VPC is doing its work. The VPC fully intends to promote prevention science, including what is known about effective program initiatives (best practices, model programs, promising programs) and research and evaluation. It advocates for identifying and using measurements of success--short and long-term indicators and outcomes measures. Prevention science encourages the use of indicators that can show that risk factors are declining and resiliency factors are increasing, leading to conclusions about violence rates dropping over time. A list of risk and protective factors can be found on Hawaii’s Alcohol and Drug Abuse Division web site. One example of VPC’s work is the Violence Report Card which will use secondary data from agencies such as schools, courts, police, the health department and hospitals to measure change over time, and results from the coordinated community approach. Hawaii has several projects underway which collect and report the data that will be used by the Violence Prevention Consortium. (e.g., Healthy People 2010, U.H. Center on the Family’s Data Center, and The Department of Health’s Alcohol and Drug Abuse Division’s social indicators and risk and protective factors studies. Nationally, there are excellent examples of this work at the Colorado’s Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence which creates the Blueprints for Violence Prevention and the Center for Substance Abuse Administration (CSAP) in the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Division of the US Department of Health and Human Services. CSAP has technical assistance from CAPTS that provides information on how to do outcomes evaluation. Additionally, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention of the U.S. Justice Department examines what does and doesn’t work for youth violence prevention and the Centers for Disease Control also publishes studies and provides technical assistance on how to measure success of public health programs directed at the prevention of injury and death. This is needed in order to discontinue methods that don’t work and use those that do instead. The Violence Prevention Consortium will use a predetermined set of indicators to measure whether or not the Consortium’s work is having success. Additionally, it will share information on objective and subjective data available, such as university research reports, on the nature and extent of the problem of violence in Hawaii.
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