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Primary Prevention

Strong communities

With funding from the National Institute of Justice, our team at Boston Children’s Hospital — in partnership with the Center for Global Health at the University of Illinois Chicago — is developing an evidence-based public health primary prevention approach to decrease the risk of hate-motivated violence in communities. Our goal is to find effective ways to help prevent violence before it begins. We do this by focusing on the entire community, rather than just those who are already at risk of violence.

Through our research we identified five critical areas for preventing hate-motivated violence.

The five critical tasks for the prevention of hate-motivated violence are:

  1. Foster emotional well-being
  2. Promote critical thinking
  3. Reduce problematic internet use
  4. Address injustices
  5. Increase belonging for all

View our final cross-community report.

Developing a new measure of support for violent radicalization

Our team at Boston Children's Hospital and the University of Illinois Chicago received funding from the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center (NCITE) in 2024 to develop a new measure of support for violent radicalization (VR). The overall purpose of this project is to improve the measurement of efficacy for terrorism and targeted violence (TVT) primary prevention programs. Our primary outcome is to establish a psychometrically sound, valid means of measuring support for and exposure to violent radicalization at the community level, with particular relevance for evaluating outcomes of primary prevention programming. The project will be conducted in two consecutive phases: first, a series of subject matter expert virtual meetings to review current instruments, discuss adaptations, and changes to better capture community-level violent radicalization in the current context; and second, the development and piloting of a novel measure that assesses community-level exposure to and support for violent radicalization.