Addressing violent extremism as public health policy and practice

ABSTRACT

Addressing violent extremism could potentially benefit from new initiatives that extend beyond criminal justice and are a part of public health policy and practice. This claim is based on knowledge from prior countering violent extremism (CVE) research and on immersion with communities, practitioners, and policymakers. This knowledge indicates that to date law enforcement-centered initiatives have not generated targeted evidence-based prevention or intervention initiatives, and they have had the unintended consequence of provoking community resistance. The Center for Disease Control’s Ten Essential Public Health Services is proposed as a new conceptual framework for a public health approach to addressing violent extremism which aims for policy and practice shifts. The public health approach offers opportunities for multi-purpose programming, avoiding stigma, and leveraging existing public health resources. Such shifts are illustrated by discussing the CVE program being further developed in Los Angeles, California, based in part upon the public health model.

KEYWORDS:

• CVE
• public health
• prevention

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Stevan Weine M.D. is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine, where he is also the Director of the International Center on Responses to Catastrophes and the Director of Global Health Research Training at the Center for Global Health. Weine is author of When History is a Nightmare: Lives and Memories of Ethnic Cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Rutgers, 1999) and Testimony and Catastrophe: Narrating the Traumas of Political Violence (Northwestern, 2006). His scholarly work focuses on the impact of trauma and migration on families and communities. For over 20 years he has been conducting research both with refugees in the U.S. and in post-conflict countries, focused on mental health, health, and countering violent extremism. His research mission is to develop, implement, and evaluate psychosocial interventions that are feasible, acceptable, and effective with respect to the complex real-life contexts where migrants and refugees live.

David P. Eisenman (B.A., University of Pennsylvania, M.D., Albert Einstein College of Medicine, M.S.H.S., UCLA School of Public Health) is the Director of the UCLA Center for Public Health and Disasters (CPHD) and Associate Professor of Medicine and Public Health at UCLA. Prior to coming to UCLA, he was the Associate Director of the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture and Assistant Professor of Medicine at the New York University School of Medicine. He holds appointments in the UCLA School of Public Health and the RAND Corporation where he has researched how to improve community resilience to disasters, how to understand the correlates and social distribution of resilience among different groups (e.g., poor vs. wealthy), and how to assess and treat the health effects of disasters and trauma.

Janni Kinsler is an Assistant Professional Researcher in the Division of General Internal Medicine and Health Services Research at UCLA, and a Lecturer in the Department of Preventive Medicine at University of Southern California. She specializes in program development and evaluation. Over the past 17 years, she has been the project evaluator on several national and international grants. Since 2002, she has been an evaluation specialist on several HIV-related programs targeting disadvantaged populations in Los Angeles County using both qualitative and quantitative research methods. Between 2002 and 2009, she managed the development, implementation, and evaluation of four HIV/AIDS and immunization-related projects in Los Angeles; and oversaw the development and evaluation of a multi-site (California, Washington, Arizona) project, which partnered elementary school students with pharmacy students that promoted problem-solving skills and the scientific method.

Deborah C. Glik, Sc.D. FAAHB, is a Full Professor at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. She received her B.A. from Barnard College, served in the Peace Corps in Togo, West Africa, and completed her doctorate in behavioral sciences and public health at Johns Hopkins University in 1985. She taught at the University of South Carolina before joining UCLA in 1991. She specializes in the planning, and assessment and evaluation of public health education campaigns, material development and popular media projects. She is skilled in the planning, implementation and evaluation of public health education campaigns, materials development and using popular media for health communication. Her program evaluation expertise comprises both quantitative and qualitative research designs. She has over 35 years of experience in conducting research on health behavior change, health communications, formative research, health and media issues, and program evaluation in a variety of settings. At present she has funded research and practice projects in both domestic and global contexts.

Chloe Polutnik is a Research Coordinator Department of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She received an MPH with a global health concentration in the Community Health Sciences Division from the University of Illinois at Chicago in May 2012. Her work focuses on refugees and migrants, community resilience, prevention and intervention, radicalization, and HIV transmission. She has expertise in qualitative data collection and analysis, ethnography, scientific writing, and mixed methods.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Science and Technology Directorate and by Department of Homeland Security, Cooperative Agreement 2015-ST-108-FRG006.