Homel & McGee Chapter 20: Community Approaches to Preventing Crime and Violence:
Community Approaches to Preventing Crime and Violence:
The Challenge of Building Prevention Capacity
Authors:
Ross Homel & Tara Renae McGee
An edited version of this paper will be published in Loeber, R. & Welsh, B.
(Eds.) The Future of Criminology: Essays in Honor of David Farrington. New
York: Oxford University Press
Institution:
School of Criminology and Criminal Justice and Key Centre for Ethics, Law, Justice &
Governance, Mt Gravatt campus, Griffith University, Queensland, 4111, Australia.
r.homel@griffith.edu.au. tr.mcgee@griffith.edu.au.
Acknowledgments:
Aspects of the research reported in this chapter were supported by the Australian Research
Council (LP0560771 and DP0984675), the Criminology Research Council, the Australian
Government Attorney-General’s Department, the Charles and Sylvia Viertel Foundation, and
the Queensland Department of Communities. We also wish to acknowledge the intellectual
contributions of Dr Kate Freiberg and Dr Sara Branch, co-workers with Homel on the
Pathways to Prevention Project.
The research that we draw upon in this chapter has been published in a variety of places.
Branch et al. (in press), Freiberg et al. (2010), Homel & Homel (in press), and McGee et al.
(2011) are recent papers that interested readers may wish to consult. Many papers on the
Pathways to Prevention Project may be downloaded from
www.griffith.edu.au/pathways-to-prevention
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Homel & McGee Chapter 20: Community Approaches to Preventing Crime and Violence:
David Farrington has had an enormous influence on the theory and practice of crime
prevention. He has exercised this influence in a number of ways: through his elucidation of
the risk and protective factors related to crime, conduct disorder, violence, substance misuse,
and related problems (e.g., Murray & Farrington 2011); through his clear exposition of the
links between developmental criminology and risk-focused prevention (Farrington 2002); and
through many kinds of evaluations of crime prevention programs, including environmental or
situational approaches such as CCTV (Welsh & Farrington 2009).
One Farrington publication in particular (Farrington 1994), which highlighted the long
term effects of a range of early in life prevention programs, changed the life of the first author
of this chapter. In a context where early intervention or early prevention were largely absent
from the policy landscape in Australia this article inspired a vision for the widespread
adoption of social policies for children, families and communities based on developmental
prevention. A report for the Federal Government in 1999 by an interdisciplinary panel chaired
by Homel had considerable influence across diverse fields including child protection, mental
health, and substance abuse, although its influence on its main target of crime prevention
policy and practice was less clear. This report led, in turn, to the establishment in 2001 of the
Pathways to Prevention Project (Homel et al. 2006), a community-based early prevention
project in a socially disadvantaged area of Brisbane. Pathways, although differing in
significant ways from the projects reviewed in Farrington (1994), drew inspiration none the
less from Professor Farrington’s ideas on community prevention in a report he wrote for the
Joseph Rowntree Foundation (Farrington 1996).
In this chapter we pay tribute to Professor Farrington’s indefatigable efforts to put crime
prevention onto a scientific foundation by offering some reflections on the emerging shape of
community approaches to the prevention of crime, aggressive behaviour and violence. We
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draw on the lessons that have been learned in the last two decades about effective preventive
practice in complex community settings, including our own struggles in the Pathways Project
and in other initiatives, in order to focus on the problem of building capacity to implement
large-scale, sustainable, evidence-based prevention strategies.
Our larger goal is to support, but also to critique and expand, the agenda for a
comprehensive national prevention strategy put forward by Professors Farrington and Welsh
most recently in their book Saving Children From a Life of Crime (Farrington & Welsh
2007). We propose the use by prevention-oriented criminologists, in addition to the familiar
research-to-practice or prevention science literatures, of developmental systems theory (Lerner
& Castellino 2002) for its emphasis on relations or connections between individuals,
organisations and settings within human ecology and the need therefore to make these the
focus of preventive efforts; community centred models for insights into issues such as
community engagement and strengthening community capacity (Flaspohler et al. 2008); and
implementation science as a way of strengthening organisational capacity and governance
arrangements for prevention (Homel & Homel in press).
We also wish to suggest that the early prevention approach that is the focus of Saving
Children, while critically important, is not on its own sufficient for building community
prevention capacity within a national framework. We appreciate of course that this was not
Farrington and Welsh’s specific purpose, but since there is so much good material in their
proposals that bears on community approaches, including their recommended use of
Communities That Care as a model for “a comprehensive, locally driven program” (p.171), it
would in our view be useful to expand the agenda from early prevention to the overall
prevention of child, youth and young adult crime, violence and substance misuse.
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Homel & McGee Chapter 20: Community Approaches to Preventing Crime and Violence:
Our main reason for arguing that not all eggs should be put in the early years basket
(say, ages 0-7) is that while these programs produce consistently positive results across a
range of life domains in adolescence (such as social-emotional development, deviance, social
participation and educational success: Manning, Homel & Smith 2011), reductions in crime
or substance abuse are not necessarily maintained into late adolescence or early adulthood,
especially for males (Eckenrode, et al. 2010; Hawkins et al. 2008). Earlier positive effects
may be overwhelmed by situational and other processes characteristic of the emerging
adulthood life phase, necessitating the use of situational, regulatory or (possibly) criminal
justice preventive approaches as well as developmental interventions at various times beyond
the early years (‘early in the pathway, not necessarily early in life’ was one of the key points
of the 1999 Pathways to Prevention report). Developmental approaches in the early years can
easily be defended, and should properly be valued, on the basis of their multiple benefits
across childhood, adolescence and beyond, but a national crime and violence prevention
strategy should rely on all ethical approaches that work. In practice effective and sustainable
community strategies will increasingly be based on multi-agency collaborations that
implement, at several points in the life course, programs that are an eclectic mix of
situational, criminal justice, regulatory, and developmental approaches within a community
framework.
A key problem that Farrington and Welsh (2007) identify is that there is little agreement
on the definition of community prevention. We opt with them for Hope’s (1995) definition as
“actions intended to change the social conditions that are believed to sustain crime in
residential communities” (p.21). However, interventions that really do attempt to change
social conditions are rarely evaluated to the standard that Farrington and Welsh rightly
demand. An exception is Communities That Care, an extremely promising risk-focused
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Homel & McGee Chapter 20: Community Approaches to Preventing Crime and Violence:
community mobilization model (Hawkins et al. 2008). Another well-evaluated model aimed
at changing social conditions was the Fighting Back community empowerment initiative
designed to support communities in tacking drugs, delinquency and violence (discussed by
Embry 2004). Unfortunately, the evaluation showed that Fighting Back had no effect on child
or youth outcomes and actually had a significant negative effect on adult substance abuse,
perhaps supporting Embry’s conclusion (p. 577) that “the findings soundly refuted the
community-empowerment model.” A third example of a well evaluated but in this case very
effective community violence prevention initiative comes from Sweden. Based on systematic
research, a strong cross-sectoral partnership, reforms in organizational practices, and good
governance, the Stockholm Prevents Alcohol and Drug Problems Project (STAD) maintained
a reduction of around one third in levels of violence in and around licensed premises on an
ongoing basis (Wallin, Lindewald, and Andréasson 2004), using a mix of regulatory,
community and situational strategies.
These examples illustrate that community approaches can be well evaluated and can be
effective. However, the generally poor state of scientific knowledge about community
prevention, especially when attempted at scale, suggests that the field needs better concepts
and a broader array of tools. We have found in creating and implementing the Pathways to
Prevention Project that developmental systems theory (DST) has provided an invaluable
framework for organizing our thinking about the focus of preventive activities, which should,
as we have noted, be on changing the relations or connections between the different levels of
organization in the developmental system (Freiberg, Homel and Branch 2010). A central idea
of DST is that an individual develops within levels of organization that interact with each
other in complex ways that vary over time. These levels of organization range from the
biological and inner-psychological through the proximal social relational (including
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interactions in the nuclear and extended family and in local social, work, and peer networks)
through the community to the socio-cultural and social structural levels and the natural and
built environments (Lerner & Castellino 2002).
The relational emphasis of DST has profound implications for prevention theory and
practice since children, families, schools, community agencies and residents have to be
thought about simultaneously in terms of their reciprocal interactions with each other within a
dynamic (time varying) system. One practical interpretation of DST is that to strengthen the
developmental system and achieve sustainable improvements in child and youth outcomes,
service providers or community agencies need to forge trusting relationships with families
and children, and form respectful power sharing alliances with local organisations such as
schools, churches, child care centres, kindergartens, or youth organisations. They also need
ideally to operate within a framework of integrated or collaborative practice, characterised
by a blurring of the boundaries between organisations and by harmonious, mutually
supportive practices in families, schools, community agencies, and other key settings.
Collaborative practice has always been a primary goal of the Pathways to Prevention Project
but as reported by Branch, Homel & Freiberg (in press) remains as yet largely out of reach,
consistent with the experience of nearly all those who have engaged in cognate endeavours.
The practices that fit naturally within the developmental systems framework - building
trust and respectful relationships, engaging families, and striving for collaborative practice
between services and enduring developmental institutions such as schools – have a close
affinity with community-centred or collaborative community action models of intervention
(Flaspohler et al. 2008; Weissberg & Greenberg 1998). In these models the focus is on the
evolution of practice in local contexts and on the improvement of existing practice over the
introduction of something new, with the practitioner taking centre stage rather than being the
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Homel & McGee Chapter 20: Community Approaches to Preventing Crime and Violence:
recipient of an innovation developed through external research. Empowerment, capacity
building, and engagement are the hallmarks of these approaches, but as Bowen, Gwiasda, and
Brown (2004, p.356) observe in reporting the results of two community engagement projects,
community residents and the prevention field are in “vastly different places with respect to
primary violence prevention.” There is a huge gap between what often happens in
community-centred approaches and what prevention science demands in terms of careful
measurement, use of randomised controlled trials, and program fidelity.
Straddling this gap has been a primary goal of the Pathways to Prevention Project,
which has aimed simultaneously to use existing models of family support and school and
community engagement while introducing where possible program approaches based
explicitly on research, underpinning the whole enterprise with as much systematic
measurement of patterns of participation and child and family outcomes as is possible within
the hurly burly of the daily routines of schools and a busy community agency. Our optimism
that a genuine scientific synthesis between the research-to-practice and community-centred
models is possible is based both on our experience in Pathways and on the generally sanguine
outlook of others in the field (e.g., Weissberg & Greenberg 1998). How this dialectic plays
out will certainly be one of the defining features of the community prevention field over the
next few years.
Talk of community engagement and related issues raises the important issue of
community capacity and its links with prevention capacity (Flaspohler et al. 2008). The
community, whether viewed as the locality or in broader terms (such as city entertainment
areas that attract adolescents and young adults), provides a potentially rich context for
modifying person-environment interactions central to crime and violence prevention. Many
millions have been invested around the world in building community capacity, on the
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Homel & McGee Chapter 20: Community Approaches to Preventing Crime and Violence:
assumption that it is an effective strategy for addressing a wide range of local problems,
despite the fact that there is little clarity about its meaning and as a result “the translation from
broad concept to social action is fraught with difficulty” (Chaskin 2001, p. 293). A critical
missing element in community prevention research is rigorous quantitative analysis that
establishes the likely causal effects on child and youth outcomes of well-conceptualised and
theoretically grounded dimensions of community capacity.
There are actually good grounds for dismissing community or locality altogether as a
causal risk factor for crime and antisocial behaviour, since when individual and family factors
are controlled standard measures of community characteristics such a social disadvantage
often disappear, as in a recent analysis by McGee and colleagues (2011) of antisocial
behaviour by Brisbane adolescents. Of course this does not rule out community-based
prevention strategies, but the target of such strategies would be individual and family risk
factors, not social conditions. However, support for strategies that explicitly aim to build
community capacity comes from recent work by Odgers and her colleagues (2009), who
conceptualised community capacity in terms of collective efficacy. They demonstrated with
UK data that collective efficacy exerts an effect on antisocial behaviour at school entry over
and above individual and family factors, but only in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. If
replicated this finding gives clear direction to those who argue for prevention based on
building community capacity (e.g., Sabol, Coulton, and Korbin 2004), but the challenge then
for the field will be to devise strategies that actually improve collective efficacy in
challenging disadvantaged areas, and to demonstrate rigorously consequential reductions in
crime and violence.
So far in this chapter we have highlighted the value of some ambitious new directions
for community prevention, and to some extent thrown out a challenge to entrenched thinking
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Homel & McGee Chapter 20: Community Approaches to Preventing Crime and Violence:
based on the typical research-to-practice model. That such a challenge is required is plainly
evident in the recent literature on prevention, since even its most ardent defenders are
conceding that the traditional, one directional model of “science to service” is a failure
(Fixsen et al. 2009, p.532).
Implementation science, which has arisen largely within the human services and health
fields, is one response to the challenge of getting scientific evidence into routine practice
(Fixsen et al. 2009) and has many lessons to teach those concerned with community crime
prevention. Systematic reviews of implementation processes suggest that implementation is a
recursive process with six functional stages: exploration, installation, initial implementation,
full implementation, innovation, and sustainability. These are elaborated by Ross and Peter
Homel (in press), who demonstrate their applicability to crime prevention through a series of
case studies and also outline the core components of effective implementation: staff
recruitment, training, coaching and performance evaluation, supported by data systems, a
facilitative administration, and a responsive system. Homel and Homel view these core
components as part of a governance model for human service agencies, and argue that the
crime prevention field can make a distinctive contribution to implementation science through
the governance systems for multi-organisational partnerships with which crime prevention
practitioners have such familiarity. Such partnership approaches have been largely ignored so
far within the implementation science literature.
Regardless of scientific or ideological persuasion, there is plenty in the agenda we have
adumbrated in this chapter for all those concerned with community crime prevention. Those
wedded to traditional prevention science will find much to attract them, but also many
challenges, in its young cousin, implementation science. Similarly, those committed to
community centred approaches, including working with services already established in the
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Homel & McGee Chapter 20: Community Approaches to Preventing Crime and Violence:
community, need to demonstrate using quantitative measurement and rigorous research
designs that such approaches really prevent crime and violence. All could be enriched in their
thinking and practice by drawing on relational developmental systems theory into which, for
example, established theories of social bonding and newer concepts of community capacity
neatly fit. But all of these complicated theories and ambitious plans for community change
will founder unless they are grounded in the gritty empirical realities of crime and violence so
brilliantly analysed by David Farrington throughout his long career.
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