Introduction
Violence is a universal vice that threatens the peace of a community, its life, health and happiness of everyone residing in the community. The fact that violence is so pervasive, it is seen as part of human life and it is a fact of livelihood that needs response from the community members rather than dwelling on its prevention.
In another dimension, violence is considered as an issue that befits law and order whereby health professionals are limited to dealing with the consequences. Due to the rising proportions of violence in America taking interest in Colorado a research program known as CSPV was established to help the community in preventing violence (Department of Justice, 2010).
Discussion
The discussion on this will mainly focus on the violence that occurs in Colorado. One of the main types of violence in Colorado is family or domestic violence. This is attributable to the fact that a spouse commits half of the deaths in Colorado with victims being females on most occasions.
Violence in Colorado has severe impacts to the welfare of the community at large. There are factors that increase risk of exposure to community violence, which include living in poor areas and being a minority group. Community violence has diverse effects to its people. First, in cases where children are involved, they will have to grow up with disabilities due to physical aftermath of the violence. Another effect is in the psychological consequences, which may include agitated behavior and even children experiencing nightmares.
Secondly, adolescents may become depressed and feel alienated due to the effects of violence. This is common to those exposed chronically to community violence. Adolescents may also experience other trauma-related effects such as impaired self-esteem, drug abuse and attempting to commit suicide.
Lastly, the effects of violence also greatly affect the family members. The parents may be anxious on the well-being of their children hence leading to frustration and anger. Due to this, they find themselves in a blame game for not protecting their children, which may later lead to strained relationships in the family (Goguen, 2011).
In preventing violence in Colorado, Centre for the Study and Prevention of Violence came up with three missions that they would use to counter the effects of violence. First, they use information clearing house in collecting resources that are based on the causes and prevention of violence and providing the public with direct information services.
Secondly, they evaluate and develop violence prevention programs through offering technical assistance to the community. Lastly, they maintain an analysis of other projects in terms of causes and prevention measures.
A good example of violence in Colorado is the Ludlow massacre, which was an attack on coal miners and their families by the Colorado National Guard. This violence resulted in deaths of women and children from being burnt under a single tent (Martelle, 2007).
Engaging the whole community in ending violence is a complex work, but changing the society’s attitude is done one-step at a time. Complacency is said to be a barrier to tackling violence as it greatly encourages violence and is formidable when responding to violence. Reductions geared towards violence both interpersonal and collective violence depends upon dealing with complacency of any form (Martelle, 2007).
Conclusion
Violence in the world today has taught people crucial lessons about its prevention ways that one can mitigate the consequences that it brings about. One lesson learnt from this is that violence is often predictable and preventable. In order to get the best interventions needed for violence it is vital to know the context of violence.
The context rallies around the circumstances that it occurs and what attitude the society in question has towards it. When planning for the prevention of violence there is, need to understand the context of the violence in order to tailor intervention to the target population (University of Colorado, 2011).
References
Department of Justice, (2010). Bureau of Justice Statistics. Retrieved from https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=2217
Goguen, C. (2011). A National Center for PTSD Fact Sheet: The Effects of Community Violence on Children and Adolescents. Web.
Martelle, S. (2007). Blood passion: The Ludlow Massacre and class war in the American West. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
University of Colorado, (2011). Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence. Retrieved from https://cspv.colorado.edu/