142nd APHA Annual Meeting and Exposition

Annual Meeting Recordings are now available for purchase

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Setting the Stage: A Brief History of Youth Violence Prevention as a Public Health Problem

142nd APHA Annual Meeting and Exposition (November 15 - November 19, 2014): http://www.apha.org/events-and-meetings/annual
Monday, November 17, 2014 : 10:30 AM - 10:50 AM

Howard Spivak, MD , National Institute of Justice/ US Department of Justice, Washington, DC
The public health approach to youth violence prevention has been evolving over the past three decades from a primary focus on those youth already involved in violence and to more of a focus on the primary prevention of youth violence. Much of the work in this area has focused on strategies directed towards individuals, families and school-based interventions from which a rich base of evidence for effectiveness has developed and become increasingly applied in communities across the country. However, these approaches have not produced the population level impact that is necessary to create the level of improvement and change that will really make a true difference especially in higher risk communities that are experiencing the largest burden from the problem.

More recently, the focus has begun to shift more substantially to population level approaches rooted in community change that address the environments that young people grow up and live in. These strategies focus on elements such as the built environment, the factors that affect social norms for behavior and problem solving, community level policies, and the manner in which communnity services are organized to interact with each other and with youth themselves.

This presentation with serve as an introduction to the issue of youth violence prevention and lay the groundwork for presentations on these newer approaches that appear to have the potential of having the desired population level impact that will make real differences in the lives of young people growing up in the urban communities in the United States.

Learning Areas:

Planning of health education strategies, interventions, and programs
Public health or related public policy

Learning Objectives:
Describe the development of the public health approach to youth violence prevention. List several of the key strategies in youth violence prevention that have an established evidence base for effectiveness.

Keyword(s): Violence & Injury Prevention, Youth Violence

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I am the Director of the Division of Violence Prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. I have been working in the area of youth violence prevention for over 30 years. My work has involved program development, research and evaluation, and translation and dissemination.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.