Building Community Capacity for Violence Prevention

• NCJ Number: 205926
• Journal: Journal of Interpersonal Violence Volume: 19 Issue: 3 Dated: March 2004 Pages: 322-340
• Author(s): William J. Sabol; Claudia J. Coulton; Jill E. Korbin
• Editor(s): Jon R. Conte
• Date Published: March 2004
• Length: 19 pages
• Publication Format: Article
• Publication Type: Report (Study/Research)
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This article addresses the capacity of communities to prevent violence from three perspectives: youth violence, child maltreatment, and intimate partner violence.

Abstract

Violence prevention programs need to be structured in ways that contribute to the communities’ own capacity to prevent violence. This article addresses three questions related to the capacities of communities to prevent violence in the areas of youth violence, child maltreatment, and intimate partner violence: (1) what is known about community violence prevention capacity; (2) how are more protective communities built; and (3) how are changes measured in a community’s capacity to prevent violence? It is suggested that community social control and collective effectiveness are significant protective factors for all three types of violence. However, these need to be distinguished further for their relationships to private, parochial, and state controls. It is argued that strong interpersonal ties are not the only contributors to collective efficiency and violence prevention. There are several things which are important to building community capacity for violence prevention: (1) thinking of the capacity in terms of social interactions rather than in terms of cumulating assets; (2) thinking about how social interactions at the private and parochial levels enhance or build collective efficiency; and (3) thinking about the role of state controls, especially criminal justice institutions. It is argued that even though violence prevention programs in the three areas rarely have an explicit goal of building community capacity to prevent violence, the programs can nevertheless be part of a community-building effort. The complexity of neighborhood and community influences on violence can best be understood through multidisciplinary, multimethod approaches. In addition, analyses in which neighborhoods are usually represented by census tracts because of data availability are powerful in their large sample size and generalizable findings. These approaches to research are promising for uncovering the structures and processes that contribute to community capacity for violence prevention. References