The Concept and Measurement of Violence and Abuse in Health and Justice Fields: Toward a Framework Aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals

Abstract

Violence reduction is a United Nations (UN) sustainable development goal (SDG) and is key to both public health and criminology. The collaboration between these fields has the potential to create and improve prevention strategies but has been hampered by the usage of different definitions and measurements. This paper explores the definitions and measurements of violence by the World Health Organization, UN, and Council of Europe to arrive at a harmonized framework aligned with the SDGs. Violence and abuse are defined by these organizations as intentional actions that (are likely to) lead to harm, irrespective of physicality or legality. When recording violence and abuse, health- and justice-based administrative systems use different codes which cannot directly be translated without resorting to broad overarching categories. Additionally, the identification of the number of victims, perpetrators, and events is challenging in these systems due to repeat victimization/offending, multiple victims/perpetrators, and multiple engagements with services associated with a single event. Furthermore, additional information on the victims (e.g., ethnicity) and events needs to be registered to evaluate progress toward the SDGs. We propose a framework to record violence that includes individual and event identifiers, forms of violence and abuse (including physical, sexual, and psychological), harm, and individual and event characteristics.