Community Violence as a Population Health Issue Proceedings of a Workshop (2017) / Chapter Skim
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3 Changing Landscapes of Violence Through Social and Physical Interventions
3 Changing Landscapes of Violence Through Social and Physical Interventions
Pages 17-30
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From page 17... ...
Laporte Professor of Nursing and asso ciate dean for research and innovation at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, describing four take-home points from the research she and her team have conducted on the strategies young people and adults use to stay safe in their communities. Howard Pinderhughes, associate professor and chair of social and behavioral sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Nursing, then presented a framework he has developed with colleagues at the Prevention Institute on community trauma and resilience, and Charles Branas, professor of epidemiology and director of the Penn Injury Science Center and the Urban Health Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, discussed an evidence-based solution to firearm violence.
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From page 18... ...
. • Social networks and infrastructures of social support, including culturally relevant mental health approaches, can strengthen and elevate social norms, promote healthy behaviors, and establish collaborations that pro mote healthy communities (Pinderhughes)
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From page 19... ...
The final snapshot Richmond shared, one she said was highly relevant to why it is important to change landscapes from a social and physical perspective, looked at the effect of microneighborhood conditions on adult educational attainment because education is considered a path out of poverty. This study, again conducted with colleagues at CHIEVEability, looked at how adults living in 130 housing units spread A across a 2.1-mile radius in West Philadelphia progressed toward finishing their general educational development degree, their associate degree, and finally a bachelor's degree, all requirements for living in CHIEVEability.
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From page 20... ...
. Conducted between 1995 and 1997, this study found that adults, largely white and middle class, who had four or more adverse childhood experiences from a list of nine were more likely to have chronic disease and suffer from a mental illness.
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From page 21... ...
Structural violence refers to the harm individuals, families, and communities experience from the economic and social structure, social institutions, and relations of power, privilege, and inequity that may harm people and communities by preventing them from getting their basic needs met. The concept of synergistic trauma also integrates the concept of complex posttraumatic stress disorder, which he said is a psychological injury resulting from protracted exposure to prolonged social and interpersonal trauma in the context of either captivity or entrapment.
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From page 22... ...
Intergenerational poverty, long-term unemployment, fleeing businesses, limited local employment opportunities, and government and private disinvestment also contribute to community trauma. Dislocation and gentrification are more recent additional elements of structural violence.
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From page 23... ...
As a final comment, Pinderhughes noted that social networks and infrastructures of social support, including culturally relevant mental health approaches, can strengthen and elevate social norms, promote healthy behaviors, and establish collaborations that promote healthy communities. Shifting and changing social norms, he said, means changing the 5 For more information, see https://rootsofsuccess.org (accessed September 15, 2016)
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From page 24... ...
. For urban firearm violence, the longer term solution would focus on remediating blighted urban environments, he explained, instead of focusing solely on victims, individuals responsible for gun violence, and weapons.
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From page 25... ...
For example, mandating that cars have airbags and changing roadways to make them safer has likely had a far more lasting and high-impact effect on reducing automobile mortality and morbidity than driver education programs. Before discussing specific programs, Branas asked for practitioners in the field to think more about conducting randomized controlled trials and carefully designed quasi-experimental studies to learn what works.
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From page 26... ...
They found a biologically significant drop in heart rate when people walked by the newly greened lots, said Branas. Anecdotal evidence from interviews with community members also supports the efficacy of this approach, with multiple community members reporting that they avoid vacant lots and even take different routes to school or work to avoid interacting with abandoned spaces that they perceive as threatening.
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From page 27... ...
One interesting finding has been that firearm violence is reduced by blight remediation strategies, but other types of violence is less affected, perhaps because blighted spaces can serve as "storage lockers" for illegal guns. Early evidence from a randomized controlled trial of vacant lot greening, said Branas, showed that the magnitude of these reductions in firearm violence was most pronounced in neighborhoods below the poverty line.
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From page 28... ...
Pinderhughes then added that HOPE SF, a project to transform San Francisco's most distressed public housing sites into thriving 9 For more information, see http://www.thevanishingcity.com (accessed September 15, 2016)
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Branas remarked that prior to producing evidence that rehabilitating empty lots and abandoned buildings actually worked, Philadelphia had smaller blight reduction programs that would come and go in a single neighborhood of the city. Only now has the city begun institutionalizing these programs on a citywide basis, informed to a generous extent by scientific studies that have emerged in recent years.
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From page 30... ...
A second component is getting the American public to understand how traumatized it has become and to recognize this as a problem the nation needs to address. Samara Ford, an undergraduate at Harvard College, asked how the nature of education in the nation's schools and the ways in which students are taught or not taught about the environments in which they live interact with the bigger structural issues the speakers discussed.
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