A Systemic Wound, Not a Personal Flaw
Violence is often treated as a moral issue, a legal issue, or an individual failure. It is usually simplified into one of those categories so that it can be punished, analyzed, or ignored. But in reality, violence is none of those things on its own. It is the outward expression of internal wounds, generational pain, structural disempowerment, and cycles left unbroken for too long.
You cannot solve violence by simply condemning it. You must understand it, and once you understand it, you can begin to create a system where peace is not something we enforce, but something we enable.
It’s easy to look at someone who commits an act of violence and think, “That person is evil.” But the deeper question, the one rarely asked, is, “What brought them to that point?”
The data is very clear on this. People who commit violence are overwhelmingly more likely to have grown up in violent homes, to have experienced physical or emotional abuse, or to have been surrounded by conflict for years before ever acting it out themselves.
In a long-term study by the National Institute of Justice, children who were abused or neglected were found to be thirty percent more likely to be arrested for a violent crime as adults. That doesn’t mean everyone who’s hurt will hurt others, but it does mean that the cycle of violence is real. And it repeats unless it is interrupted.
What causes the cycle to begin is often a combination of poverty, exclusion, disempowerment, and trauma. When you don’t feel safe, respected, or seen, it changes how you respond to the world. For some, it makes them retreat. For others, it makes them lash out. And for too many, it teaches them that force is the only way to be heard or respected.
I’m not excusing the violence, but I am diagnosing the most likely cause so we can develop a proper cure.
In many parts of the world, violence is met with one standard response, more violence. A person commits harm, and we harm them back. A person lashes out, and we lock them up. The idea is that by removing them, we protect the community and deter others from doing the same.
Here’s what the research tells us, sixty-eight percent of people released from prison in the United States are rearrested within three years. Among youth, that number is even higher. The longer someone spends in prison, the more likely they are to be unemployed, undereducated, and disconnected from their community when they return. And if they return to the same environment that led them to violence in the first place, nothing changes. The cycle continues.
We have built a system that waits for violence to happen, then punishes it in ways that often make things worse. This system does not rehabilitate, it only temporarily incapacitates.
When you treat violence like a contagious illness, something that spreads through exposure and can be interrupted through care, you get a very different result.
One model for this is known as “violence interruption,” where trained individuals, often former offenders themselves, are deployed into communities to de-escalate conflicts before they turn violent. These programs, like Cure Violence in Chicago, have led to a forty to seventy percent reduction in shootings in the neighborhoods where they operate. That is a transformational shift in safety, achieved without force, without police raids, without prisons. It was achieved through conversation, community trust, and presence.
In Glasgow, Scotland, once considered the knife crime capital of Europe, a similar strategy was implemented. Officials treated violence as a public health issue, investing in youth programs, mentorship, trauma counseling, and education. Over the next decade, violent crime dropped by nearly half.
So what do these strategies have in common? They don’t treat violent people as monsters. They treat them as people who need healing. They don’t just ask, “What did you do?” They ask, “What happened to you and what needs to happen next?”
Many people don’t realize that violence and silence are closely related. When people are unable to express what they’ve experienced, when they’re forced to bottle up pain, shame, and powerlessness, it eventually finds a way out. Sometimes it takes the form of addiction. Other times it takes the form of aggression. Either way, it’s the result of unexpressed pain.
Violence often comes from people who feel that society has nothing for them. So, they take whatever power they can, in whatever way they know how. Sometimes, that means a gun. Sometimes, it means a fist. Always, it means a failure of the systems that were supposed to help.
If we want to prevent violence, we need to invest in the exact opposite of the conditions that cause it. That means creating systems that provide mental health support, economic opportunity, conflict resolution skills, and role models who embody self-respect rather than domination.
The earlier these investments are made, the better the outcome. After-school programs, mentoring, and job training are more effective and more affordable than court dates and prison cells. These are proven interventions.
In some communities, instead of relying on courtrooms and judges, people are turning to a model called restorative justice. This process brings together the person who committed harm, the person who was harmed, and members of the community to talk about what happened, how it impacted everyone involved, and what needs to be done to repair it.
Restorative justice does not ignore accountability. In fact, it often requires more of it. A person who caused harm must sit face-to-face with the person they hurt, hear them, and take meaningful steps to repair the damage.
Studies have shown that restorative justice reduces recidivism by up to fourteen percent compared to traditional models, with even greater improvements in satisfaction and healing for victims.
In our society we don’t just want to prevent violence, we want to eliminate the perceived need for it.
We do this by creating environments where people feel that they matter. Where every life has value, and every conflict has a path to resolution.
We build schools that teach emotional intelligence alongside academics. We create jobs that offer meaning. We fund community leaders who people trust, not just distant enforcers they fear. We replace our obsession with punishment with a commitment to healing.
