The “Public Health Approach” to Prevention

The document describes a comprehensive public health approach to preventing targeted violence, moving away from targeting specific ideologies or communities toward addressing behavioral indicators and environmental conditions. It outlines a four-tiered framework—primordial, primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention—designed to build individual and community resilience. The model emphasizes evidence-based programming and the involvement of multi-sector stakeholders, including educators, mental health professionals, and law enforcement, to 'desecuritize' the field of violent extremism prevention.

• The public health model focuses on 'risk factors' (negative conditions that allow targeted violence to take root) and 'protective factors' (conditions that inoculate individuals and communities), rather than isolating specific 'vulnerable' communities or particular ideologies.
• Primordial prevention aims to foster naturally resilient environments by addressing broad social ills, such as racism, polarization, and the 'loneliness epidemic', through civic engagement and youth resilience programs.
• Primary prevention involves population-wide efforts to 'educate and inoculate' society, including bystander training and media literacy to counter extremist influence online.
• Secondary prevention focuses on disrupting the path to violence for vulnerable individuals through threat assessment and 'wrap-around' intervention services, prioritizing 'demobilization' or 'disengagement' over total 'deradicalization'.
• Tertiary prevention targets individuals already involved in the justice system to prevent recidivism and includes community healing efforts following an attack to prevent retaliatory violence.
• The model requires 'evidence-based' programming, meaning each program must undergo independent, rigorous evaluation to determine if it should continue to be implemented.
• While the approach is praised for being agnostic to specific ideologies and upholding human rights, it faces challenges including the difficulty of proving a negative in upstream prevention and the resource-intensive nature of a fully realized model.

APA

Reimer, J. (2023). The “Public Health Approach” to Prevention. Institute for Strategic Dialogue. https://www.isdglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Public-Health-Prevention-Explainer.pdf

Chicago

Reimer, Jordan. The “Public Health Approach” to Prevention. Institute for Strategic Dialogue, 2023. https://www.isdglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Public-Health-Prevention-Explainer.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Reimer |first1=Jordan |title=The “Public Health Approach” to Prevention |publisher=Institute for Strategic Dialogue |date=September 2023 |url=https://www.isdglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Public-Health-Prevention-Explainer.pdf |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{reimer2023public, author = {Reimer, Jordan}, title = {{The “Public Health Approach” to Prevention}}, institution = {Institute for Strategic Dialogue}, year = {2023}, month = sep, url = {https://www.isdglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Public-Health-Prevention-Explainer.pdf}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }