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Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Should Violence be labeled a Contagious Disease?







I don't know if I would use the word contagious. But I often wonder whether violence should be condemned in history as a National Health Problem? I will even used the word "habitual" but contagious is very debatable! Just my thoughts- Philly's Own Gossip Girl coming at ya!  

Is It Time to Treat Violence Like a Contagious Disease?


Image: Fabrizio Rinaldi/Flickr
The idea that violence is contagious doesn’t appear in the Obama administration’s gun control plan, nor in the National Rifle Association’s arguments. But some scientists believe that understanding the literally infectious nature of violence is essential to preventing it.
To say violence is a sickness that threatens public health isn’t just a figure of speech, they argue. It spreads from person to person, a germ of an idea that causes changes in the brain, thriving in certain social conditions.
A century from now, people might look back on violence prevention in the early 21st century as we now regard the primitive cholera prevention efforts in the early 19th century, when the disease was considered a product of filth and immorality rather than a microbe.
“It’s extremely important to understand this differently than the way we’ve been understanding it,” said Gary Slutkin, a University of Chicago epidemiologist who founded Cure Violence, an anti-violence organization that treats violence as contagion. “We need to understand this as a biological health matter and an epidemiologic process.”
Slutkin helped organize a National Academies of Science workshop that in October published “The Contagion of Violence,” a 153-page report on the state of his field’s research.
What they describe might seem at first like common sense. Intuitively we understand that people surrounded by violence are more likely to be violent themselves. This isn’t just some nebulous phenomenon, argue Slutkin and his colleagues, but a dynamic that can be rigorously quantified and understood.
According to their theory, exposure to violence is conceptually similar to exposure to, say, cholera or tuberculosis. Acts of violence are the germs. Instead of wracking intestines or lungs, they lodge in the brain. When people, in particular children and young adults whose brains are extremely plastic, repeatedly experience or witness violence, their neurological function is altered.
Cognitive pathways involving anger are more easily activated. Victimized people also interpret reality through perceptual filters in which violence seems normal and threats are enhanced. People in this state of mind are more likely to behave violently. Instead of through a cough, the disease spreads through fights, rapes, killings, suicides, perhaps even media, the researchers argue.
'People often don't have an answer why violence goes up or down. Sometimes it's because of the epidemic nature.'
“The underlying theme is learned behavior. That’s what gets transferred from person to person,” said Deanna Wilkinson, a professor in Ohio State University’s Department of Human Development, who led the research in New York City and works with Cease Fire Columbus, that city’s implementation of the Cure Violence principles.
Rowell Huesmann, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, echoed Wilkinson’s point. “The contagion of violence is really a generalization of the contagion of behavior,” he said. “How do cultures transmit norms and beliefs across generations? It’s through observation and imitation. There’s no genetic encoding.”
Not everybody becomes infected, of course. As with an infectious disease, circumstance is key. Social circumstance, especially individual or community isolation — people who feel there’s no way out for them, or disconnected from social norms — is what ultimately allows violence to spread readily, just as water sources fouled by sewage exacerbate cholera outbreaks.
At a macroscopic population level, these interactions produce geographic patterns of violence that sometimes resemble maps of disease epidemics. There are clusters, hotspots, epicenters. Isolated acts of violence are followed by others, which are followed by still more, and so on.
There are telltale incidence patterns formed as an initial wave of cases recedes, then is followed by successive waves that result from infected individuals reaching new, susceptible populations. “The epidemiology of this is very clear when you look at the math,” said Slutkin. “The density maps of shootings in Kansas City or New York or Detroit look like cholera case maps from Bangladesh.”
Some of the best-known research on this phenomenon comes from analyses of homicides in New York City. Homicide rates nearly tripled between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s, rose in waves through the mid-1990s, and then fell precipitously, like a disease burning itself out.
This didn’t only hold true for killing, but also for non-lethal violence, hinting at an important feature observed by other researchers: An act of violence doesn’t just stimulate other acts, but other kinds of acts. Killings lead to domestic violence which leads to community violence which leads to suicide.
Such dynamics might sound almost mechanistic, as if violence could be considered in isolation from all the other factors — poverty, drugs, demographics, policing — that shape the society in which it occurs. That’s absolutely not the case, but neither are these factors solely responsible for violence outbreaks.
“This is one of the most important things about this: People often don’t have an answer why violence goes up or down,” said Slutkin. “Sometimes it’s because of the epidemic nature. It doesn’t track with something like jobs or general social conditions.”
Despite the research behind it, the violence-as-contagion framework is relatively little-known. There’s still a tendency to view violence, in particular the mass shootings that precipitated the current national dialogue on violence, as isolated acts of madness or evil.

A comparison of clustering patterns seen in violence in a Chicago neighborhood (above) and cholera outbreaks in southeastern Bangladesh (below). Images: 1) City of Chicago Data Portal 2) Ruiz-Moreno et al./BMC Infectious Diseases
Even when social factors are considered, it’s often in a general way. To David Hemenway, director of Harvard University’s Injury Control Research Center, the idea of violence as contagion is more useful as metaphor than literal description.
“It helps you understand things better,” said Hemenway. “What it means is that sometimes, if you get the infection early, you can have a big effect. But if you wait and wait, it’s hard to impose a policy that will have a huge effect.”
Hemenway said that policies to reduce gun violence don’t necessarily require a contagion framework to benefit from the principles. Wilkinson agreed that just the idea is valuable, but she and Slutkin argue for more direct, epidemiologically informed programs.
The Cure Violence approach, which identifies potential outbreaks while trying to change social norms, enrolling ex-convicts as public health workers who intervene in hotspots, has dramatically reduced gun violence where it’s been tried in Baltimore and Chicago.. Those efforts were documented in the film The Interrupters.
Key to this approach, said Slutkin and Wilkinson, is understanding that quarantine — criminal incarceration — is a limited tool, something that needs to be applied in certain circumstances but won’t suffice to prevent violence any more than imprisoning everyone with tuberculosis would stop that disease.
“You do interruption and detection. You look for potential cases. You hire a new type of worker, a violence interrupter, trained to identify who is thinking a certain way. They have to be like health workers looking for the first cases of bird flu,” said Slutkin. “In a violence epidemic, behavior change is the treatment.”
Ultimately this changes community norms, making it harder for germs of violence to spread. “The way that public health workers deal with the spread of AIDS is by educating, by redirecting behavior, by changing norms in a community so that everyone uses a condom,” said Wilkinson.
It’s not immediately clear that these lessons, drawn from the epidemiology of largely drug- and gang-related urban violence, could apply to the Newtown or Aurora or Virginia Tech tragedies, but underlying factors transcend demography. “They’re part of the same syndrome,” said Slutkin, who likened the mass shootings to what epidemiologists called sporadic disease, while urban violence is endemic.
The shooters were socially isolated, disconnected in their own minds from social norms. In their isolation, the idea of violence may have grown pathologically. As anthropologist Daniel Lende wrote after the shooting of Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 18 other people, Jared Loughner didn’t simply have a mental health problem, but a violence problem.
A view of violence as contagious doesn’t directly inform the Obama administration’s gun control plan, which is focused largely on gun availability and mental health services. President Obama did, however, encourage the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to resume public health research on gun violence, which was suppressed in the mid-1990s after pro-gun advocates took issue with findings that, at least statistically, keeping guns at home didn’t protect people.
Specific programs and research questions aside, Wilkinson hopes that understanding violence as contagious will spread a broader message. “It helps us a lot more than rhetoric about getting tough on crime, harsher penalties, locking people away,” she said. “We need to help people change their behavior.”

Gun Crisis-Our Response to Gun Violence Philadelpia

#GunCrisis 



Posted: 29 Jan 2013 09:44 AM PST
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Epidemiologists argue that violence is a disease that spreads from person to person, thriving in certain social conditions. They say exposure to violence is conceptually similar to cholera or tuberculosis, and that acts of violence are the germs.
So, a recent article at Wired.com asks: Is It Time to Treat Violence Like a Contagious Disease?
Children watch from a stoop as police investigate the crime scene following a double shooting at F and Ontario Streets in the Kensington section of Philadelphia at about 6 p.m. Sunday. Joseph Kaczmarek photographed the scene for the Gun Crisis Reporting Project.Children watch as police investigate a double shooting Sunday in the Kensington section of Philadelphia. Joseph Kaczmarek photographed the scene for the Gun Crisis Reporting Project.
Wired: “A century from now, people might look back on violence prevention in the early 21st century as we now regard the primitive cholera prevention efforts in the early 19th century, when the disease was considered a product of filth and immorality rather than a microbe.”
This isn’t just a phenomenon, according to epidemiologist Gary Slutkin of cureviolence.org, but a dynamic that can be rigorously quantified and understood.
“The epidemiology of this is very clear when you look at the math,” said Slutkin. “The density maps of shootings in Kansas City or New York or Detroit look like cholera case maps from Bangladesh.”
Locally, the public health response model is practiced by interrupters from Philadelphia Ceasefire. We took a walk through North Philadelphia with them during last summer’s National Night Out:

Read the complete article at wired.comIs It Time to Treat Violence Like a Contagious Disease?
Wired adds that Slutkin helped organize a National Academies of Science workshop that in October published “The Contagion of Violence,” a 153-page report on the state of his field’s research.
 
Posted: 29 Jan 2013 07:31 AM PST
an-logo_apr27dEarlier this month, the American Anthropological Association released a statement on gun violence, on behalf of their members, which number more than 11,000.
“Since it is necessary to understand a problem in order to solve it, there is an urgent need for research by social scientists, public health experts and others into the relationship between guns and public safety and into measures that might reduce the number of lives lost to gun-related violence every year.”
Medics wheel a wounded man into the emergency department at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania after he was shot earlier this month in Southwest Philadelphia. Tom Kelly photographed the incident for the Gun Crisis Reporting Project.Medics wheel a wounded man into the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania after he was shot earlier this month in Southwest Philadelphia. Tom Kelly IVphotographed the incident for the Gun Crisis Reporting Project.
The letter addresses the history of public funding for research in the U.S. and the disruption of gun research at the Centers for Disease Control in recent decades, adding that ‘the U.S. government seems to be actively impeding it.”
The letter calls on Congress and the Administration to stop obstructing knowledge about guns and public safety and make additional federal funds available to reduce the tragic loss of life in incidents involving guns.
Read the AAA’s complete: Statement on Gun Violence
 

The Nex tStep: Black Film Making in Philly


Panel discusses Black filmmaking in Philly Featured

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Rel Dowdell is the writer and director of “Changing the Game.”—SUBMITTED PHOTORel Dowdell is the writer and director of “Changing the Game.”—SUBMITTED PHOTO
City Councilman-at-Large David Oh, through his Black Film Advisory Committee, presents “The NextStep: Black Filmmaking in Philadelphia.” One of the committee’s main objectives is to make Philadelphia a hub for aspiring filmmakers, and tomorrow’s free and interactive event will feature networking and an expert panel discussing what it takes to break into and succeed in the film industry from the Black perspective.
“Providing an opportunity for aspiring filmmakers is a natural fit for the creative/innovation focus of my city council committee” said Councilman Oh, chairman of the committee on global opportunities and the creative/innovative economy. “The goal of this event is to have Philadelphia-based experts who have succeeded in the film industry share their advice and insights with people who want to follow the same career path.”
The expert panel will include Charlie Mack and Jamal Hill, the producer/director team of “Streets”; Tanya Hamilton, writer and director of “Night Catches Us”; Q Deezy of Hot 107.9 Philly FM and producer and actor in “Exit Strategy”; James Elam, producer of several feature films and documentaries; and Rel Dowdell, writer/director of “Changing the Game.” The moderator of the panel will be Michael Dennis (aka Mike D.), award-winning filmmaker and founder of Reelblack.
“Technology has really made it possible for anybody with an idea to execute on a high level as far as production quality value,” explained Dennis, who is a member of the advisory committee. “In the past, when everything was filmed, it was prohibitively expensive for most people to consider themselves making feature films. But with the DVD and digital, there are more opportunities for people to become filmmakers. I think the objective is ‘how do you make better films that people want to see?’ I mean nobody wants to make a film and then have it stuck in a drawer. These people on the panel have actually done it. They are all of the filmmakers that have not only produced feature films, but gotten them distributed nationally. They’ve taken different paths, but we’re calling it the ‘Next Step’ because hopefully, wherever you are in your evolution or development you’ll come away inspired to go further and learn either how to do it or learn from the panelist’s mistakes so you don’t have to make the same mistakes.”
“The Next Step: Black Filmmaking in Philadelphia” takes place on Jan. 30 from 5:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. at The Painted Bride Art Center, 230 Vine Street. The free event is open to all aspiring filmmakers in Philadelphia. To RSVP, visit http://bfac.eventbrite.com. For more information, visit facebook.com/PhillyBFAC.

Contact staff writer Bobbi Booker at (215) 893-5749 or bbooker@phillytrib.com.

Monday, January 28, 2013

Gossip Girl's message to the Rick Ross-es of the world!










Rick Ross you are the prime example of what we need to help promote non violence. You and Rappers like you are the ones that our children emulate. But how can we count on you to steer them in the right direction when you seem as lost as they do!- Philly's Own Gossip Girl coming at ya.......

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Gun Crisis Report in Philadelphia- More Shootings

#GunCrisis



Posted: 28 Jan 2013 06:51 AM PST
Children watch from a stoop as police investigate the crime scene following a double shooting at F and Ontario Streets in the Kensington section of Philadelphia at about 6 p.m. Sunday. Joseph Kaczmarek photographed the scene for the Gun Crisis Reporting Project. Children watch from a stoop as police investigate the crime scene following a double shooting at F and Ontario Streets in the Kensington section of Philadelphia at about 6 p.m. Sunday. Joseph Kaczmarek photographed the scene for the Gun Crisis Reporting Project.
Police look at a car damaged by gunfire on Ontario Street, Sunday Jan. 27, 2013, in the Kensington section of Philadelphia following a fatal double shooting. According to police a 22 year-old man was shot once in the chest and twice in the arm on the street at about 6 p.m. and was transported to Temple hospital by medics where he was listed in critical condition and a second victim was pronounced on the scene.   Police said the shooting may have started by a black Honda parked on Ontario Street between E Street and F Street that had several bullet holes. GunCrisis.org/ Joseph KaczmarekPolice look at a car that was damaged by gunfire on Ontario Street, following the double shooting where one man died Sunday. Photograph by Joseph Kaczmarek.
Police say that two men were inside a Honda Accord when a man walked up, opened the passenger door and got into a dispute with the driver, according to 6ABC, adding that the man exchanged gunfire with the driver and was shot in the torso. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
A 22-year-old, who has not been unidentified, was wounded once in the chest and twice in his right arm, according to philly.com. He is listed in critical condition at Temple University Hospital.
Police gather by the victim's body on F Street near Ontario Street, Sunday Jan. 27, 2013, in the Kensington section of Philadelphia following a fatal double shooting. According to police a 22 year-old man was shot once in the chest and twice in the arm on the street at about 6 p.m. and was transported to Temple hospital by medics where he was listed in critical condition and a second victim, a man in his late 20's, was pronounced on the scene.   Police said the shooting may have started by a black Honda parked on Ontario Street between E Street and F Street that had several bullet holes. GunCrisis.org/ Joseph KaczmarekPolice gather by the victim’s body on F Street near Ontario after Sunday’s double shooting. Photograph by Joseph Kaczmarek.

 
Posted: 28 Jan 2013 06:23 AM PST
A 25-year-old man was shot in the back on the 1500 block of South Dover Street in the Grays Ferry section of Philadelphia Sundat at around 5:15 p.m. The victim was reported in stable condition at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.
 
Posted: 28 Jan 2013 06:05 AM PST
Residents watch the police investigation after a 36-year-old man was shot multiple times Sunday around 3:30 p.m. on the 2900 block of North 5th Street in the Fairhill section of Philadelphia. He was pronounced dead at Temple University Hospital a short time later.Click to view slideshow.
Joseph Kaczmarek photographed the scene for the Gun Crisis Reporting Project, adding that crime scene investigators recorded at least 18 pieces of ballistic evidence on Cambria Street between 5th Street and Reese Street.
No arrests have been made, according to reports from CBS3 and NBC10.