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Date: April 30, 2024 Tue
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Results for world health organization
2 results foundAuthor: Higginson, Angela Title: The Impact of Policing Interventions on Violent Crime in Developing Countries Summary: Background for the review Violent Crime Violence is a global public health problem with complex causes at the individual, family, community, and societal levels (World Health Organization [WHO], 2002a). Worldwide, the direct impact of violence is estimated at 4400 deaths per day and many thousands of injuries (Krug, Mercy, Dahlberg, & Zwi, 2002), and the economic cost of this violence is estimated to be between $95 and $163 billion per year (Geneva Declaration Secretariat, cited in Willman & Makisaka, 2010). Direct costs of violent crime victimisation include those related to health care, lost work productivity, law enforcement and prosecution of offenders, rehabilitation, and repairing damage to property (Fajnzylber, Lederman, and Loayza, 2002; Hofman, Primack, Keusch, and Hrynkow, 2005; WHO, 2002a). For victims, mortality, physical and psychological damage, disability, and social problems are immediate and long-lasting outcomes of violence (WHO, 2002a). The indirect impact of violent crime varies across countries. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines violence as “the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation.” (WHO Global Consultation on Violence and Health, cited in WHO, 2002b, p. 5). Individual level risk factors include age and gender, while individual level protective factors centre on social connections with family, friends or school groups (Willman & Makisaka, 2010). Family risk factors for violent crime include harsh parenting styles, physical or psychological abuse, and the involvement of other family members in crime (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), 2008). Communities are at risk of violence when violence has historically been present in the area, when firearms are easily available and sections of the population have been trained in their use (UNODC & the Latin America and the Caribbean Region of the World Bank, 2007). Weakness of state security institutions, including the criminal justice system and the military, is also associated with higher levels of violence at the societal level (UNODC, 2005). Rapid urbanisation, low education levels, and high income inequality, especially when divided along religious, ethnic, or racial lines, further increase the risks of violence in a society (Willman and Makisaka, 2010). Developing countries are particularly affected by violent crime, with interpersonal violence a leading cause of death and disability (Hofman et al., 2005; Liebling & KiziriMayengo, 2002; Morrison, Ellsberg, and Bott, 2007; Seedat, Van Niekerk, Jewkes, Suffla, and Ratele, 2009). In addition, violent crime can indirectly suppress growth in developing countries when local or international agents are influenced, by their perceptions of violent crime in the region, to refrain from investing socially or economically in developing the area (Akpokodje, Bowles, & Tigere, 2002). Fear of violence prohibits development by preventing local citizens from travelling to work and school, encouraging capital flight, increasing brain drain as educated citizens leave troubled areas, and lowering social cohesion (Willman & Makisaka, 2010). The World Health Organization typology of violence categorises violent acts into selfdirected violence, interpersonal violence and collective violence, and notes that whilst the nature of the violent act may be similar across categories, the causal mechanisms and motives for each category of violence are very different (WHO, 2002b). The nature of effective interventions will also differ across categories, and therefore the effectiveness of interventions needs to be reviewed separately for each category. Whilst collective violence is a clear threat to the stability and growth of developing countries, the complexities of the specific contexts of collective violence - such as war, state violence, genocide, or terrorist activity - mean that interventions to combat collective violence are likely to be dependent on socio-political context, and are considered to be outside the scope of the present review. Our review focuses on interpersonal violent crimes in developing countries. We define interpersonal violent crime as those acts of violence - such as assault, homicide, rape, kidnapping, sexual assault, and maltreatment - committed by one person or small group against another person or small group. There are many different types of interventions that seek to reduce interpersonal violent crime in developing countries, and several different ways to classify interventions. Interventions can be broadly separated according to the point at which the prevention program is implemented. Programs that aim to prevent or reduce violent crime can be grouped into primary, secondary or tertiary interventions (Van Der Merwe and Dawes, 2007). Primary prevention programs are broad based and aim to prevent the occurrence of a problem or behaviour, secondary prevention programs focus on individuals at risk of developing the behaviour, and tertiary prevention programs focus on reducing the problem behaviour in individuals who already exhibit the behaviour (for example, youths already displaying violent behaviours) (Van Der Merwe and Dawes, 2007). Interventions can be classified according to whether they address violence at either the individual, family or community levels; indeed, it is argued that the most successful interventions are those that address all three levels (Van Der Merwe & Dawes, 2007). Interventions can also be classified according to the societal sector in which they are implemented. Social interventions include parent training programs, school-based education programs, family enrichment, gender equality education, life skills training programs, and edutainment initiatives. Economic-based interventions that target violent crime problems include microfinance credit schemes and raising the price of alcohol. Health sector programs include screening and referral programs, victim advocacy and support groups, and psychological or medical interventions. Programs often involve coordinated, multi-sector responses involving multiple agencies working together to reduce violent crime (WHO, 2002a). Justice system interventions can be defined as interventions that focus on preventing or reducing violent crime and actively involve at least one entity of the justice system (e.g. courts, corrections, police, legislation), or a surrogate organisation providing justice system services (e.g. an NGO intervening to provide conflict mediation services). These organisations may be intervening to provide surrogate justice services (for example, providing conflict mediation services to disputants within the country) or to build justice system capacity (for example, by providing advice or training to a newly formed police force). These supplementary interventions are an important part of the violence prevention portfolio in developing countries, where justice systems are often under-resourced and struggle to contain large problems such as drug trafficking (e.g. Latin America and the Caribbean) or terrorism (e.g. Afghanistan, Pakistan) while dealing with local violent crime. Justice system interventions may include: - Legislative changes to criminalise violent behaviour or strengthen penalties for violent crime; - Police actions such as community policing, increased patrols, police training programs, and creation of specialist police forces; - Removal of risk factors for violence through enforcement of bans on alcohol and firearms; - Reformation of the court system through legal aid systems, alternative processing of violent offenders and alternatives to formal court processes such as restorative justice programs. The largest, and arguably the most important, component of the justice system that focuses on efforts to reduce violent crime is policing. Indeed, the preliminary results of our scoping review indicate that the largest category of justice system interventions that address interpersonal violent crime in developing countries relate to policing, with over one third of documents describing justice system interventions reporting on the areas of police reform, activity, training, surveillance and non-state policing. As such, the focus of our review is to synthesise the evaluation literature that focuses on policing interventions that target violent crime in developing countries. We will include policing interventions that work at primary, secondary or tertiary levels, and interventions that focus on individual, family or community factors. Policing in developing countries In developed democracies, police reform has generally followed what Kelling and Moore (1988) describe as three major eras of policing: the political era, the professional era and the community policing era. Whilst policing scholars debate the detail of these eras in policing history (see Bayley, 1994; Greene & Mastrofski, 1988; Skogan, 1990), they argue that policing in the 21st century is most likely characterised by a new era of policing (Bayley & Nixon, 2010; Mazerolle & Ransley, 2005; Stone & Travis, 2011). Policing in democratic societies has largely moved from being highly politicised agencies - responding to calls for service based on political demands, deriving their legitimacy from local political authorities, with a broad mandate to deal with a range of social issues from hunger to homelessness to riot control - to going through the professionalisation of the occupation during the 1970s, to establishing the foundations for community policing during the late 1980s and early 1990s. We also note that different police agencies progressed through these eras at different time periods in developed democracies. We argue that developed country police agencies, which have experienced all three eras of change and development over a period of nearly 100 years, are situated very differently to police agencies in emerging democracies. Policing and police agencies in many emerging democracies and developing countries have very different histories to those in the developed world: often times developing countries have long histories of military or totalitarian rule, with no experience of a civilian police (Brogden, 2002). Many countries have experienced only great politicisation of their policing services and have skipped over the professionalisation era in an effort to quickly establish community policing approaches as part of rapid state building activities (see, for example, Goldsmith and Dinnen, 2007; Goldsmith and Harris, 2010). Moreover, most developing countries lack the physical infrastructure, governance mechanisms and social norms that form an essential background to the successful implementation of policing interventions indeveloped democracies, and they often lack a strong judiciary to regulate and constrain policing behaviour. This review will focus on policing interventions and their ability to prevent or reduce violence in developing countries. We use the term "developing countries" to refer to economically developing countries, defined as developing according to World Bank country classifications (http://data.worldbank.org/about/country-classifications/countryand-lending-groups). However, we acknowledge that there can be economically developing countries that are established democracies and economically developed countries that are "developing" democratically. Despite the continuity implied by the terms "developing" and "developed," we propose that there are significant and qualitative differences between policing initiatives in western democracies and those that are implemented in developing countries. The fundamental difference lies in the institutional histories and capacities of police agencies in developed and developing countries. The contextual differences in intervention implementation provide a strong justification for a review exclusively focused on developing country evidence; those strategies that have been deemed successful for policing in developed countries are not necessarily appropriate for developing countries. These countries often have low police professionalism, poor relations between the police and the public, under-equipped police services and an unstable political and/or socio-economic situation, and, in some cases, low community enthusiasm and participation (Eijkman, 2006; Frühling, 2007, 2011). We recognise that there are likely to be few high-quality experimental and quasiexperimental evaluations of violent crime interventions in developing countries. Developing countries struggle to provide accurate and reliable data on criminal justice processes, lack research resources, have varying culture-specific definitions of violent crime, and, in many cases, seriously under-report certain types of crime such as sex and race-based violence. Ethical considerations associated with researching violent crime in developing countries also contribute to the dearth of research (Neugebauer, 1999; WHO, 2002a). Much of the existing evidence is not available in a published, peer-reviewed form, and often essential information is not reported. No systematic review has combined experimental and quasi-experimental evidence from developing countries on the impact of violent crime interventions. The sole reviews conducted on the topic have been qualitative and exploratory in nature (Akpokodje et al., 2002; Willman & Makisaka, 2010). Despite the likely data limitations, we consider the topic urgent and important enough to warrant a full systematic review of experimental and quasi-experimental impact evaluations. Overall, we argue that the different histories and structural context of policing in developed and developing countries are so fundamentally different that we will only include policing interventions that target populations in developing countries. We do not limit the geographic focus of the review, except to exclude countries defined as “developed” by the World Bank. This exclusion is intended to limit the population under study and not to necessarily limit the geographic region under study. Details: Queensland, Australia: International Initiative for Impact Evaluation, 2013. 31p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed January 11, 2019 at: https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/data/UQ_308505/UQ308505_protocol.pdf?Expires=1547323086&Signature=eMW4Bu7KFq7KtNeu1cVqDuuNnw51AGI8q9YgyJKhCt5D1bwqu0iqlE0gWZFAEKHnETPONL5nDHGp3fCZAjwydsCo0OE1z4xfeiEVXMv7p2VmqoNAmZWhyVdtYCnhX-eRFlBjxPFeN~aNsK4yGjl~LbMD7dDH~fRWvH7~BA7Vy0oFNMltkNRQej-pmyoNxMSY7xWBHEOst3nsRl-u8nsA00sITQLxVc13-E358YL4TlLx9PbrB2qh1YjxOCzcCJIq026GbYOvHv2a1LPqtBUc4hZmqxZHjqJr1XYwqhZ2uOmNBL4GPeSaC8fl8vXZYFBE~i4wbHLCnzW60Vf6wzRM1Q__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJKNBJ4MJBJNC6NLQ Year: 2013 Country: International URL: https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/data/UQ_308505/UQ308505_protocol.pdf?Expires=1547323086&Signature=eMW4Bu7KFq7KtNeu1cVqDuuNnw51AGI8q9YgyJKhCt5D1bwqu0iqlE0gWZFAEKHnETPONL5nDHGp3fCZAjwydsCo0OE1z4xfeiEVXMv7p2VmqoNAmZWhyVdtYCnhX- Shelf Number: 154107 Keywords: Costs of Crime Developing Countries Development Assistance Interpersonal Violence Justice Systems Policing Violent Crime World Health Organization |
Author: World Health Organization, Europe Title: The Economic Dimensions of Interpersonal Violence Summary: Summary Interpersonal violence is expensive. For instance, estimates of the cost of violence in the United States of America reach 3.3 percent of the gross domestic product. In England and Wales, the total costs from violence - including homicide, wounding and sexual assault - amount to an estimated $40.2 billion annually. Interpersonal violence is defined to include violence between family members and intimate partners and violence between acquaintances and strangers that is not intended to further the aims of any formally defined group or cause. Self-directed violence, war, state-sponsored violence and other collective violence are specifically excluded from these definitions. This report, based on an extensive review of peer reviewed articles and published and unpublished reports, treats the following themes: - The economic effects of interpersonal violence in a variety of socioeconomic and cultural settings. - The economic effects of interventions intended to reduce interpersonal violence. - The effects of economic conditions and policies on interpersonal violence - with particular reference to poverty, structural adjustment, income equality and social investment. Interpersonal violence disproportionately affects low- and middle-income countries. The economic effects are also likely to be more severe in poorer countries. However, as this report shows, there is a scarcity of studies of the economic effects of this violence in low- and middle-income countries. Comparisons with high-income countries are complicated by the fact that economic losses related to productivity tend to be undervalued in low-income countries since these losses are typically based on foregone wages and income. For example, a single homicide is calculated to cost, on average, $15 319 in South Africa, $602 000 in Australia, $829 000 in New Zealand, and more than $2 million in the USA. Many of the studies detailing the costs of violence are from the USA where child abuse results in $94 billion in annual costs to the economy - 1.0 percent of the gross domestic product. Direct medical treatment costs per abused child have been calculated by different studies to range from $13 781 to $42 518. Intimate partner violence costs the USA economy $12.6 billion on an annual basis - 0.1 percent of the gross domestic product - compared to 1.6 percent of the gross domestic product in Nicaragua and 2.0 percent of the gross domestic product in Chile. Gun violence - which includes suicides - has alone been calculated at $155 billion annually in the USA, with lifetime medical treatment costs per victim ranging from $37 000 to $42 000. Evidence abounds that the public sector - and thus society in general - bears much of the economic burden of interpersonal violence. Several studies in the USA showed that from 56 percent to 80 percent of the costs of care for gun and stabbing injuries are either directly paid by public financing or are not paid at all - in which case they are absorbed by the government and society in the form of uncompensated care financing and overall higher payment rates. In low- and middle-income countries, it is also probable that society absorbs much of the costs of violence through direct public expenditures and negative effects on investment and economic growth. There are relatively few published economic evaluations of interventions targeting interpersonal violence. Available studies showed that preventive interventions to stop interpersonal violence occurring cost less than the money that they save, in some cases by several orders of magnitude. The 1994 Violence Against Women Act in the USA has resulted in an estimated net benefit of $16.4 billion, including $14.8 billion in averted victim's costs. A separate analysis showed that providing shelters for victims of domestic violence resulted in a benefit to cost ratio between 6.8 and 18.4. Similarly, the costs of a programme to prevent child abuse through counselling equalled 5.0 percent of the costs of child abuse itself. Implementation of a gun registration law in Canada cost $70 million, in comparison with a total annual cost of $5.6 billion for firearm-related injuries in that country. Interventions that targeted juvenile offenders - including aggression replacement training and foster care treatment - resulted in economic benefits that were more than 30 times greater than the corresponding costs. The approaches taken to several key methodological issues differed substantially across the studies reviewed. Studies documenting the economic effects of interpersonal violence have used a broad range of categories of costs. Those estimating indirect costs - including the opportunity cost of time, lost productivity and reduced quality of life - provided higher cost estimates than studies that limited the costs of violence to direct costs alone. Other key methodological issues included the economic values assigned to human life, lost productive time and psychological distress. The rate at which future costs and benefits are discounted, in accounting terms, also varied across studies. Given the wide range of methodological differences and extensive gaps in the existing literature on the economics of interpersonal violence, there is a clear need for systematic future research into the costs of violence. Such research should follow rigorous methodological guidelines, be inclusive of both direct and indirect cost categories, and - perhaps most importantly - be comparable across countries and settings. The World report on violence and health (Krug et al., 2002) also showed that effective interventions are available - particularly in the areas of child abuse and neglect by caregivers, youth violence and gun-related violence. Given the overwhelming evidence of the high costs of interpersonal violence, detailed analysis of the economic feasibility of interventions is a clear research priority. Details: Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organization, 2004. 70p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed January 11, 2019 at: http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/42944/9241591609.pdf;jsessionid=EBA6E91F536ECB8444021C76ECAA0491?sequence=1 Year: 2004 Country: International URL: https://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/publications/violence/economic_dimensions/en/ Shelf Number: 154106 Keywords: Child Abuse Costs of Violence Developing Countries Economic Evaluation Interpersonal Violence Intimate Partner Violence World Health Organization |