Abstract
The public health approach maintains that violence is shaped by a range of risk factors that can be altered, mitigated, or even eliminated. Conceptualizing violence as a type of “preventable disease” has provided important insights and interventions but also introduces limitations that may not be sufficiently acknowledged or understood within this perspective, particularly in the Global South. This chapter briefly outlines the history of the public health approach to violence in South Africa before describing its yields and limits. It then draws on recent studies, which suggest that the integration of interdisciplinary approaches emerging from a strong social science tradition can mitigate many of the conceptual limitations of the public health approach. The chapter concludes by demonstrating how approaches to violence grounded in these sorts of frameworks promise to deliver context-rich explanations of violence alongside the socio-ecological accounts for violence favored by a public health approach.
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Notes
- 1.
The notion of race is problematic and should be understood as a social construct rather than a biological one. It is, however, an important factor for individual risk profiles for violence. Definitions of race in South Africa follow Apartheid-era conventions that may not have the same meaning as the same terms used in other countries or regions. “Black” or “African” is used to refer to black Africans, as well as some mixed-race individuals; “Colored” is used to refer to a phenotypically diverse but culturally specific community of mixed-race origins, and is not used to refer to people who are simply mixed-race; in South Africa colored people may also choose to identify as black (Brodie 2021).
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Brodie, N., Bowman, B., Ncube, V., Day, S. (2023). The Role of Social Sciences in Advancing a Public Health Approach to Violence. In: Liamputtong, P. (eds) Handbook of Social Sciences and Global Public Health. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25110-8_95
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