Treating violence as a contagious disease

Detect and interrupt potentially violent conflicts

To interrupt violence, the Cure Violence approach deploys violence interrupters who locate potentially lethal disputes while they are in progress and respond with a variety of techniques both to prevent imminent violence and to change the norms that encourage the use of violence.

Identify and change the behaviors of those at highest risk

The Cure Violence approach employs outreach workers to change the norms, thinking, and behavior of people at the high-risk for involvement in violence. Outreach workers act as mentors to a caseload of participants, seeing each client multiple times per week, conveying a message that rejects the use of violence, and assisting program participants to obtain needed services such as job training and drug abuse counseling.

Change group and community norms

To fundamentally change the nature of violence in communities, the community norms that accept and encourage violence must change fundamentally. At the heart of the Cure Violence approach for community norm change is the idea that the norm change is possible if multiple messengers of the same new norms are consistently and abundantly heard.