Violence Reduction and Sustainable Development: Challenging the Violence Divide

Abstract

A central focus of Sustainable Development Goal 16 is to ‘Significantly reduce all forms of violence and related death rates everywhere’. This chapter explores the magnitude of this task, focussing on the persistence – and in some cases intensification – of stark differences both within and between societies around the world in the level of suffering and death imposed by ‘ordinary’ violence in the streets and homes. These differences dramatically shape the lived experience of people on different sides of what I call the ‘violence divide’. At the extreme, they produce rates of violent death that are over 200 times higher in the most dangerous countries than in the least. These disparities are both a consequence and a cause of failures of sustainable and equitable development. They are sharpest and most consequential between parts of the global South and most of the advanced industrial societies, but they also appear in stark relief within some advanced societies, most notably the United States, reflecting broader, enduring inequities that are only weakly challenged, if at all, in the current political climate. Reducing these fundamental disparities in life and death will require moving well beyond the relatively minor criminal justice reforms and limited prevention efforts that often dominate national and international dialogue, to grapple seriously with the structural forces that breed them.

Citation

Currie, E. (2020), "Violence Reduction and Sustainable Development: Challenging the Violence Divide", Blaustein, J., Fitz-Gibbon, K., Pino, N.W. and White, R. (Ed.) The Emerald Handbook of Crime, Justice and Sustainable Development, Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 87-104. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-78769-355-520201008