Problematizing the medicalization of violence: a critical discourse analysis of the ‘Cure Violence’ initiative

ABSTRACT

Violence has in recent years been framed as a public health problem. The medicalization of violence has involved various public health initiatives, with the USA based violence prevention initiative Cure Violence (CV), being one of the most prominent. CV, which operates in 23 US cities and multiple countries abroad, was launched in 2000 by former WHO epidemiologist Gary Slutkin with the aim to reduce violence. Its public health approach maintains that violence is an actual disease, which can be controlled and contained via epidemiological methods and strategies applied in disease control. This study used discourse analysis to explore how CV’s medicalization of violence is tied to a neoliberal rationality of governing that disentangles violence from structural factors and explains violence solely by reference to individual pathology. In doing so, CV produces new identities based on assumptions concerning biological infection or immunity resistance, which, as its visual language shows, are grounded in race. Through a politics of exclusion, CV turns these ‘at risk’ identities into appropriate targets for health intervention, with the aim of encouraging these to act upon themselves to improve or restore their productive capacities in order to achieve the idealized form of healthy citizenship that CV propagates.

KEYWORDS:

• Discourse analysis
• violence
• epidemiology

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Norma Rossi, An Jacobs, Marco Bernardini, Benjamin Budde, Ben Whitham, and the anonymous journal referees whose comments improved this article.

Disclaimer

The views expressed here are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, the Ministry of Defence, or any other United Kingdom government agency.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. CV has shown mixed results. Butts et al. show that CV significantly reduced gun violence within most communities, but in a great number of instances there was either no effect, or the program was even linked to an increase in violence (Butts et al., 2015; Webster, 2015). The U.S. Department of Justice’s CrimeSolutions.gov database labels CV ‘promising’ rather than ‘effective’ www.crimesolutions.gov.