Shani Buggs, PhD, is a public health researcher at the University of California, Davis, and one of the nation’s leading experts on anti-racist methods for reducing gun violence in American communities. Here, Buggs answers our questions about outreach-based community violence intervention (CVI), a grassroots approach to quelling violence that is the subject of a comprehensive new research paper she and her colleagues authored in collaboration with LISC.

Does the public grasp the nature of gun violence in America? Do people understand which people and places are most affected?

[Dr. Shani Buggs] No, most people don't understand. The overwhelming majority of violence in America is not random. It is spontaneous, but it is not random. It is concentrated among individuals who have experienced multiple levels of structural violence and been chronically exposed to the notion that violence is power. In neighborhoods that experience high rates of violence, it is concentrated within city blocks, within street segments. And within those places, only a small percentage of the population is at highest risk for violence involvement.

I say “violence involvement” because the victim-offender overlap is real. Most of the individuals who go on to commit violence have been victims or survivors of violence themselves, including, as I said, structural violence—intergenerational poverty, lack of access to economic opportunity and housing and food stability, mass incarceration and the violence that comes from and with incarceration, exposure to family violence or intimate partner violence in the home, witnessing community violence as children. It's often just assumed that, “Oh well, those people are just violent. People are born violent.” But violence is learned and it is cultivated. That means that we can undo the circumstances and factors that lead to increased risk of violence. I think that the broad public doesn't fully understand that.

Read the full article about anti-violence community intervnetions at LISC.