Reframing Violence as a Community Epidemic
In a previous post, I discussed the intergenerational effects of violence and trauma, but today I’d like to dig a bit more into violence as a disease in communities. We often think of violence as something that one person does to another—and that is certainly accurate—but the individuals who commit that violence have often experienced it themselves. Like influenza spreads through a community from person-to-person, family-to-family, violence also spreads through the spaces we inhabit.
We model what we see and what we live, then pass on the love and pain we experience to others. Please be warned that some of what I’ll discuss may be upsetting or trigger memories of abuse that you may have suffered. Please be gentle with yourself.
Passing on Violence
One of the most prominent stories in the ancient Mediterranean was the House of Atreus and all the terrible things that happened to the people in that cursed family. The dispute is most famous for the bloodshed between the children of Atreus (Agamemnon and Menelaus) and his twin brother Thyestes (Aegisthus), but even minor descendants of Tantalus suffered horrible fates: Niobe’s 14 children were killed in front of her eyes by Artemis and her brother Apollo and Helen’s abduction by the Trojan Prince Paris launched the Trojan War.
At the end of the Trojan War, Atreus’s son Agamemnon returned home only to be murdered by his wife in retaliation for the sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia (and so that she could marry his cousin Aegisthus). Agamemnon’s son Orestes then killed his mother to avenge his father’s death and was driven mad by the Erinyes (Furies) for the sin of matricide. The bloodshed in the family was so severe, so damaging to the fabric of society that it took the intercession of the goddess Athena to end it (consequently establishing the Athenian judicial system).
While Tantalus and his descendants may well have been weirdly murderous by nature, the lesson from the family is that violence begets violence and that moving away from it has to be an intentional choice. Athena doesn’t generally make appearances to break up intergenerational blood feuds these days, but, thankfully, we’re capable of healing our communities without her. If we reframe violence as a disease in our communities and choose to treat outbreaks the same way we’d want to treat an outbreak of measles, we can start to be healthier together.
Normalising violence
Physical violence was normalised in my house from a very early age. When I say that I was beaten as a child, I do not mean just a little or just every now and again. I mean that my mother would pull me up the stairs by my hair, kick me in the stomach, throw chairs at me, and scratch my face. The first time I remember her hitting me, I was in kindergarten and my teacher told her I had pushed a boy. The boy (his name was Doug) had been trying to kiss me all year and was persistently touching my body. I had asked him to stop and asked the teacher to intervene many, many times. On this day, we were walking back from the gym and he cornered me away from the rest of our class. He tried again to kiss me, so I pushed him away and called him a “moron.” When my teacher told my mother, she punched me in the face so hard I got a bloody nose.
As a mother, I am constantly vigilant against passing down violence to Rónán the way it was passed to me. It would be frighteningly easy to hit him in the face when he talks back to me, to spank him when he cries that he doesn’t want to clean his room or when he won’t eat his dinner. I make the choice every day to not discipline him with violence, which is sometimes the harder choice.
Spanking is not a form of discipline that is welcome in our home because it is hitting and because there is no evidence that it results in positive developmental outcomes (though there is plenty of evidence that it is harmful). That said, I am not perfect and I have struck my child in moments of weakness and anger. I have always apologised. I have always explained why it is never acceptable to hit another human. I have always told him that I love him and that healthy love requires kindness.
Just as we model language and eating habits for children, we also model how to express emotions. When children see us raise our voices and our hands, we teach them that is how you communicate your anger, sadness, frustration, and fear. When we tell them not to hit another child and then hit them to teach the lesson, part of that lesson is that hitting is acceptable if you are bigger than the person you hit.
Changing our framework
If violence is a community-based epidemic, how do we go about curing it? Or preventing it from spreading across generations? Fortunately, there are lots of fantastic organisations working on this. I’ve talked about two successful models to help break the cycle of violence in communities below.
Before I describe them, though, I want to acknowledge the ways violence is racialised. When looking for successful violence prevention initiatives, I was concerned to find that many of them use gang participation as their pathway to reduce violence. While “preventing gang violence” is good, it is also a dog whistle for talking about the perceived dangers of youth of colour spending too much time together. In this section, I use the language of each of the interventions I discuss, but it is worth remembering the inherent racism in the way we discuss gangs and the social structures that create them.
I want to also point out that, while a lot of social violence comes from personal and community trauma, some is rooted in racist fears of another ethnic group “taking over.” I am thinking here especially of the Unite the Right rally, the murder of 9 parishioners at Emmanuel AME in Charleston, the murder of MP Jo Cox, and unionist paramilitary violence in Northern Ireland. These kinds of violence can self-perpetuate (often escalating) levels of personal and community trauma, but, just as we wouldn’t treat a viral infection with antibiotics, we must acknowledge that some violence has a different origin to effectively “treat” it.
Conflict Resolution Uncut
In the United Kingdom, the Home Office oversees a variety of youth violence prevention interventions, many of which emphasize “skill-building” and therapeutic principles to stop the origins of violence, rather than incarcerating youths who become involved in violent incidents. From 2007-2010, Catch22, a group whose origins stretch back to the 1788 Philanthropic Society, partnered with Working with Men to deliver conflict resolution skills to help boys learn to resolve disputes through nonviolent means. The intervention targeted youths between 10 and 16 who exhibited at-risk characteristics like school suspension, “challenging behaviour,” running away from home, or involvement with gang activity.
A professional conflict resolution worker trained youths and their teachers in six topic-based sessions over a half-term course, with a followup session after 12 weeks. Topics included substance use disorders, parental neglect, behaviour support, and mentoring. The professional resolution specialist worked with participating youths to target problems that were affecting their school and community so that the approach could be tailored to suit their local needs. A 2013 review of the program by Action for Children found that participating youths showed a statistically significant increase in conflict resolution skills after receiving the intervention in comparison to nonparticipating peers (pre-test, post-test). Impressively, 91% of participants who responded to the evaluation questions reported that the program had a positive impact on their attitude and behaviour, 100% reported the program deterred them from carrying weapons, 83% said the program should be targeted to at-risk youths, and 69% suggested the program begin in primary school.
Cure Violence
Cure Violence (CV) is a community-based initiative that has shown success in Chicago, Baltimore, and several other cities around the United States. The premise of CV is that violence is a social disease and, like other diseases, requires health promotion interventions to interrupt its spread. The initiative works through 3 components to “reverse the epidemic disease outbreak”:
- interrupting transmission of the disease,
- reducing risk of infection, and
- changing community norms.
CV trains community members to act as culturally-appropriate, trained “violence interrupters” who identify and mediate conflicts, including “cooling tempers” when a shooting victim has been hospitalized, working with victims, their social networks, and anyone else related to the shooting to deescalate the conflict and avoid retaliations. Retaliatory shootings are well documented–in the 1990s, at least 20 “gang-related” homicides in San Francisco could be traced back to a single car auction when a “gangster” was outbid–so intervening at the critical stage between incidents of violence is a excellent opportunity for health promotion. The violence interrupters also act as case workers, seeing youth at high risk of violence multiple times a week to connect them with services for drug treatment, employment, and assistance leaving gangs.
By engaging faith leaders, service providers, local business owners, and residents in the community; and responding to every outbreak of violence (i.e., shootings), violence interrupters help to change the social norms around violence and promote a safer environment for everyone. An evaluation of CV conducted in Baltimore with the CDC and Johns Hopkins found a 56% reduction in killings, a 44% reduction in shootings, and “strong evidence of norms change” around the rejection of the use of violence in the community. There was further evidence that the effect of the 276 conflict resolutions spread to surrounding communities.
Controlling the epidemic
My heart is breaking for the victims and families of yet another shooting this week. In the United States, we have an extraordinary number of gun deaths and there are a variety of complex factors which exacerbate it. Among them is certainly the ease of accessing firearms of extraordinary power, but just as important is the culture of acceptance of male violence. Although all women experience this violence to some degree, women of colour and trans women disproportionately experience it.
Programmes like Conflict Resolution Uncut (described above) are helping to address it, but, until we are ready to have some serious conversations about the way that we raise boys and frame masculinity, we're going to keep seeing this kind of violence in our communities. Until girls can say "no" to going to the prom without being murdered, until we can break up with our boyfriends without fear of being murdered, until we can even walk down the street without having men shout at us, this kind of violence will continue.
These patterns are deeply ingrained in our society, but we can change them. 100 years ago, (some) women in Ireland voted for the first time. 50 years ago, my employer could fire me for having a baby and the law would do nothing to protect me. 25 years ago, the US passed the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) which was the first step toward paid family leave for Americans. Last year, public attention finally turned to the epidemic of violence against women perpetuated by men. Our communities need action and even small steps forward are still forward motion.
The road to progress is long and hard, but always worth walking.