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

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.