Implementation of cure violence in international and institutional settings: The experience of England

Cure Violence (CV), formerly CeaseFire Chicago, has been helping to reduce the endemic levels of violence across some of Chicago's most violent communities since 2000. CV attempts to interrupt the transmission of violence, provide peaceful alternatives via conflict mediation, and ultimately reduce shootings and homicides. By working intensely on individual behavior change with program participants, while also attending to peer, group/gang, family, and community norms and conflicts, CV has proven to be an effective, multi-level, theory-driven intervention (Skogan, Hartnett, Bump, & Dubois, 2008). Since its inception in Chicago, and particularly after positive findings from the Department of Justice, CV has been implemented in communities across the U.S. (NYC, Kansas City), and even internationally (Iraq, Trinidad). This presentation will focus on how the CV model was adapted to fit within the cultural context of England. Moreover, CV had to be adapted to work solely with juveniles and within an institutional setting (i.e., juvenile detention center). CV staff traveled to England to train potential workers, who were all juvenile detainees, in the process of identifying and intervening in conflict nonviolently. The violence interrupter component of the program was introduced in December 2012. In this presentation, we discuss how to adapt a violence prevention program, which mainly focused on gun violence, in a setting with no firearms, solely a juvenile population, and the workers are actual juvenile detainees rather than reformed detainees. Preliminary results regarding implementation and initial outcomes will be discussed.