The Handbook of Community Safety, Gender and Violence Prevention: Practical Planning Tools

Crime prevention discourse and practice have rarely incorporated a gender perspective. Efforts to prevent violence against women have evolved separately and remain outside traditional crime prevention work from which other broader social implications related to “violence” have also been excluded. Violence is treated largely as a number of separate, disconnected issues, not only in the realm of research and writing but also in the actions of governments and the private and non-profit sectors. However, as examined in this book, there is a dense web of connections between harmful acts committed in public and in private and acts committed against oneself, strangers, acquaintances, peers and family members. In general, there are three emerging integral approaches to violence prevention:

· the health promotion approach, which analyzes violence and insecurity as a health and well-being problem. It uses techniques from addiction and infectious diseases treatments, adapted to community safety and injury prevention;
· the urban planning and management approach, which sees violence and insecurity as human rights issues that inhibit the development of individuals, communities and societies. It uses partnership and participatory governance techniques; and
· the poverty reduction approach, which focuses on the economic costs of violence to individuals and societies. It develops strategies based on livelihood concerns.

Applied together, these approaches are capable of a gendered analysis that recognizes violence against women and men in its many forms, and they all prefer the terms “community safety” and “violence prevention” to “crime prevention”. Yet they still largely operate in isolation from one another, although the second and third are addressed together in the Millennium Development Goals. Nevertheless, the gender analysis is still in its nascent stage, with a tendency to insert violence against women into a list of issues to be addressed rather than mainstreaming it into a necessary discussion of all violence. This book brings together these three streams of literature with an emerging gender analysis, emphasizing interdisciplinary research and theory on the incidence and consequences of violence, partnership-based approaches that seek collective responses to deal with the root causes of violence, and rigorous evaluation for identifying “what works, what doesn’t and what is promising” in violence prevention.

The first part of the book describes the current state of knowledge about the incidence of violence and insecurity in a global context, outlining elements of community, life course and the relationship between violence and insecurity. The second part analyzes the risk and resilience factors that cause or prevent violence, the relationships between different forms of violence, and the theories and evidence behind successful violence prevention. The third part describes successful partnership-based interventions at five different scales of governance, namely neighbourhoods, cities and localities, nations, regions and the world. The fourth part looks at the process of community safety: how initiatives develop, learn, grow, resolve conflicts and monitor and evaluate their work. A series of stages should comprise an effective strategy: bottom-up partnership, diagnostics, development of working plans based on logic frameworks, implementation and monitoring, evaluation of the plans, and modification, maintenance and mainstreaming. Part 5 turns to potential components of a multifaceted community safety plan: working at the individual, family, community and social scales of intervention. In sum, the book demonstrates how opportunities and constraints for developing a global approach to community safety and violence prevention can integrate both a gender analysis and an equal emphasis on violence in the public and private spheres.