ABSTRACT
There are four central tasks in effecting successful global strategies for violence prevention, and underpinning all of these is a need for us to work consistently to reduce fragmentation within the field. These are not essentially new, but we need to change gear and broaden the vision if we are to achieve an ambitious goal of a 50% reduction in violence over 30 years. We need to build our knowledge as a platform for prevention, and recognise the overlaps in drivers of different forms of violence and ensure that learning across areas of violence prevention. We need for inter-disciplinary research that we can build on the strengths and overcome the limitations of each disciplinary perspective. We must build an understanding of how to use evidence to develop stronger interventions, how to use evidence for this, and of the importance of systematically developed, theoretically driven interventions. We need to evaluate interventions and systematically approach intervention development. There are enormous weaknesses in the architecture of violence prevention research and innovation development. We have much to learn here from other fields. We need centres of excellence, coordination of testing and trials so that evaluations are comparable, and development of human resources for this work. A secure funding base is essential. In order to enable uptake and knowledge use, we need first to build an awareness among policy makers, donors and service providers of the poorly understood relationship between primary prevention and responses to violence. We need to build understanding of what does work in primary prevention, as well as what has never been shown to work, and to develop knowledge and build understanding of how to combine interventions to have impact at a population level,
and the required institutional delivery mechanisms. This process requires knowledge so we can fluently discuss costs.