What Does Injury and Violence Prevention Look Like in Your Community?

Image: CDC

The Centers for Disease Control want to know. Specifically, they are inviting people and organizations to participate in a video contest with cash (!) prizes. OK, you won’t be able to retire if you win, but still, it’s nice that they are offering something.

As they explain:

In commemoration of the 20th Anniversary of the CDC National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (Injury Center), we are hosting this video contest to answer the question, “What does Injury and Violence Prevention Look Like in My Community?”

The “Seeing My World through a Safer Lens” video contest asks injury and violence professionals, students, and the general public to create a short video that shows injury and violence prevention in their neighborhood, community, state, or region.

You can pick any of the following topic areas to show what injury and violence prevention looks like in your own community.

Can I just point out that lumping injury and violence prevention into the same contest seems a little odd? By “injury” don’t they seem to be implying “accidental injury”? ‘Cause, dude, I think about kids, car seats, and crime all in the same breath. Totally. I know they can go together, but, on the whole, I find the continued medicalization of crime to be a little tiresome.

Image: CDC

Sure, crime can, and does, cause physical injuries that require medical attention. But thinking of crime as a disease, with injury as a symptom, is, like, sooooo 20th Century Rehabilitative Ideal. Could we please move on to the 21st century? Please?

Nevertheless, let’s indulge the CDC. What does injury and violence prevention look like to me? First and foremost, it looks like education and prevention efforts aimed at teaching young people about healthy relationships. And then it looks like teaching males about how not to be violent. After that, it’s probably about teaching judges about why they should grant orders of protection to sexual assault, stalking, and domestic violence victims, and educating family court personnel why they shouldn’t grant joint custody to men who “only used to” abuse the mothers of their children.

I’d make a video, but hey, I don’t see a lot of that in my community.

But if you’ve got something shakin’ in yours, find the contest details here, and enter by July 31, 2012.

Peace out.

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