Stamping out Violence

May 4, 2008

An article in the New York Times Magazine addresses the issue of how to ease the levels of violence that continue to plague some inner city neighborhoods. The article focuses on the efforts of Gary Slutkin, epidemiologist and founder of CeaseFire:

He says that violence directly mimics infections like tuberculosis and AIDS, and so, he suggests, the treatment ought to mimic the regimen applied to these diseases: go after the most infected, and stop the infection at its source. “For violence, we’re trying to interrupt the next event, the next transmission, the next violent activity,” Slutkin told me recently. “And the violent activity predicts the next violent activity like H.I.V. predicts the next H.I.V. and TB predicts the next TB.”

This is a better analogy for violence than my own previous comparison of violence to a bad cough (OK, not a great metaphor). But the import is the same: violence should not be allowed to rage out of control in the hope of "getting it out of our system," but should be stifled as soon as it appears ready to flare up. This approach to violence can be mapped onto the way disease is fought.. which is another effort that is never conceptualized as a purge or cleansing.

This post is already bogged down in metaphors.. which is fascinating. We might discuss rooting metaphors out of the discourse on violence, but that will not change the fact that our leaders see violence through the lens of dominant metaphors. With shocking consistency the Bush administration has talked about violent flare-ups abroad as clarifying moments and opportunities (most recently in conflict in Basra with Mahdi militia). This reliance on an underlying metaphor of the healthiness of conflict is one of the most frightening aspects of our current leadership.

A person who grows up in a violent neighborhood (in Iraq or inner city Chicago) is like a person who walks into a bathroom stall covered with graffiti. In such a situation there is little psychological resistance to adding yet another scribble on the wall. But if every day that wall is cleaned thoroughly and one is confronted with a clean wall that bears no evidence that people have written on it, there will be an added barrier to marking that wall up. The work of combating violence is in every day making that bathroom wall look as new and untouched as possible. This is a principle that can be applied to foreign policy as well as beating violence in American cities.