Violence Prevention

Violence affects billions of peoples’ lives annually, through death, injury, and detrimental impacts on neurological, cardiovascular, immune, and other biological systems. High-risk behaviours such as unsafe sex, harmful alcohol and drug use, and smoking are more frequent among victims, among whom they contribute to lifelong ill health and premature mortality. Several Sustainable Development Goal targets call for ending or reducing violence. The science-based public health approach is used to: define the problem using descriptive epidemiology; conduct research within the framework of the social ecological model to identify risk and protective factors; use outcome evaluation studies to identify effective interventions; and scale up interventions shown to be effective. This chapter illustrates the operationalization of this approach in preventing violence against children in African countries, identifies challenges and opportunities for scaling up, and outlines the roles that multiple national-level government sectors and international agencies can play in advance the violence prevention agenda.