By CECILIA FARFÁN-MÉNDEZ

Nearshoring offers an opportunity to improve security conditions in Mexico. The historic trend of de-risking by U.S. manufacturers leaving China will produce a generational shift that will bring some manufacturing closer to the United States. This creates opportunities for new investment and economic growth that could potentially benefit Mexico. Yet, nearshoring investment to Mexico is not guaranteed and will depend on a variety of factors including but not limited to the security situation in the country. The American Chamber of Commerce in Mexico (AMCHAM) reports that 13% of its member companies are now spend- ing more than 8% of their entire operational budgets on security. Official data also shows that in 2021 the cost of crime for firms was equal to 0.67% of Mexico’s GDP. Most of this cost is from expenses incurred on preventive measures ranging from changing locks to hiring private security. In 2011 the percentage spent in preventive measures, as a measure of cost of crime, was 41.4%.

By 2021 that percentage increased to 58.1%. This means that most of the cost of crime in Mexico for the private sector derives from trying to protect their businesses from violence and insecurity in the country. Notably, Baja California was the state with the highest costs incurred due to crime in 2021 with an average cost of $5,180 compared to the national average of $3,246. The private sector has an important role to play in improving security, including: • Recognizing the crime-corruption nexus that feeds illicit activities beyond the alluring but incomplete narco-narratives (i.e. a small group of violent drug traffickers are solely responsible for violence and criminality in the country) • Rethinking security not only as the protection of physical infrastructure but also of personnel and in relation to the broader environments in which they operate. Five key ideas should be at the center of corporate decision making for future nearshoring investment in Mexico: • Too often, there are links between criminal actors and corrupt government officials, which undermines citizen security and the rule of law. Companies, whether national or international, cannot buy themselves out of this problem through private security companies.

Companies can improve security conditions in the communities where they currently operate or are considering relocating to through partnerships that help to fund and sustain evidence-based programs effective in mitigating violence and preventing recruitment into criminal groups and recidivism. • While it is an understandable decision to hire private security companies, it should be clear that doing so is not free of negative outcomes. Firearms and ammunition trafficking, particularly from the United States to Mexico, feeds the cycle of violence in Mexico and erodes business-friendly environments. • In order to promote citizen security and successful nearshoring, the private sector should advocate for public policies aimed at stemming the flow of illicit firearms and ammunition trafficking, particularly from the United States to Mexico, including supporting the Stop Arming Cartels Act that will prevent military-grade weapons from being sold and trafficked to illicit actors. • States with high levels of business victimization are also states with some of the main highways in the country critical for cross-border trade and commerce. • Latin America is the world’s most vulnerable.

bby Bernard Hollander (Author), Graeme Newman (Introduction)

Why do people do what they know is wrong—and how much responsibility should they bear for their actions?

First published in 1922, Bernard Hollander’s The Psychology of Misconduct, Vice, and Crime: A Study of Conduct, Responsibility, and Moral Failing is a fascinating early attempt to understand wrongdoing through psychology rather than through moral condemnation alone. Drawing on twenty-five years of medical practice with patients suffering from nervous and mental disorders, Hollander examines the impulses, habits, emotions, circumstances, and failures of self-control that can lead ordinary people toward destructive or criminal behavior.

Moving across the emerging fields of psychology, psychiatry, and criminology, Hollander asks questions that remain strikingly familiar today. How do heredity and environment shape conduct? Why can one person resist temptation while another cannot? What roles do opportunity, habit, intoxication, anger, fear, acquisitiveness, and sexual desire play in misconduct? And at what point should psychological impairment affect our judgment of moral and legal responsibility?

Across twelve wide-ranging chapters, Hollander investigates the psychological foundations and causes of misconduct before turning to alcohol and drug habits, aggression and violence, suspicion and deceit, theft and crimes for gain, fear of consequences, sexual conduct, egotism and domination, moral weakness, responsibility, and treatment.

Of particular interest to readers of criminology is Hollander’s rejection of simplistic explanations based entirely upon free will. He sees behavior as emerging from the interaction of predisposition, upbringing, social environment, opportunity, competing motives, and the individual’s capacity for inhibition and self-control. His treatment of professional offenders also distinguishes calculated criminality from impulsive or psychologically troubled misconduct—an early recognition that there is no single psychological type called “the criminal.”

Hollander’s science is unmistakably that of his era. Some of his terminology, assumptions about heredity and mental deficiency, views of sexuality, and continuing interest in phrenology have long since been rejected or superseded. Yet this is precisely what makes the book valuable as a historical document: it captures a formative period when psychology, psychiatry, medicine, and criminology were struggling to replace simple categories of vice and wickedness with explanations based on individual differences and the causes of human behavior.

At the same time, Hollander frequently argues against indiscriminate punishment. He considers upbringing, poverty, physical and mental condition, temptation, and circumstance; questions whether fear and punishment genuinely reform offenders; and advocates individualized treatment rather than a single remedy for every form of misconduct.

This 2026 Read-Me.Org Classic Reprint, designed and edited with a new introduction by Graeme R. Newman, preserves Hollander’s historical arguments and period terminology while correcting obvious OCR and typographical defects, regularizing punctuation, and converting spelling to contemporary American English.

More than a century after its first appearance, The Psychology of Misconduct, Vice, and Crime offers historians, criminologists, psychologists, criminal-justice students, and general readers a provocative window into the origins of modern thinking about crime, deviance, self-control, treatment, and human responsibility.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. 153p.

by Col. V. M. Masten (Author), Graeme Newman (Introduction)

What did Americans believe caused crime a century ago—and what did they think should be done about it?

First published in 1921, Stop Thief is a forceful and revealing examination of crime, punishment, policing, prisons, and social disorder in Progressive-Era America. Written by Col. V. M. Masten, the book captures a nation deeply concerned about rising crime and fiercely debating whether criminals should be deterred, punished, rehabilitated, or reformed.

Across eight wide-ranging chapters, Masten addresses immigration and crime, criminal influence and “crime by suggestion,” the courts and judges, prison reform, correctional regimes, professional sport and gambling, and proposals for improving probation, sentencing, and prison administration.

Masten is an uncompromising writer. He challenges the growing rehabilitative philosophy of his period and argues instead for discipline, deterrence, personal responsibility, and the vigorous enforcement of law. Yet some of his observations—particularly his concern with gambling, criminal association, and the ways people learn criminal behavior from others—anticipate debates that remain remarkably current.

At the same time, Stop Thief is very much a document of 1921 America. Its discussions of immigration, race, heredity, and social fitness contain prejudices and pseudo-scientific assumptions characteristic of parts of Progressive-Era criminological writing. This edition preserves that language rather than disguising or rewriting it, allowing the book to be read critically as an important historical source.

This new Read-Me.Org edition reproduces the complete original text, corrected for scanning and transcription errors, and includes a new introduction by criminologist Graeme R. Newman, placing Masten and his arguments within the history of American crime, criminal justice, immigration, and penal reform.

Essential reading for students and readers interested in criminology, criminal justice, American social history, policing, prisons, immigration history, and the Progressive Era, Stop Thief offers something more valuable than a modernized account of the past: it allows us to encounter the American debate over crime as it was actually being conducted more than a century ago.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. 189p.

by Graeme R. Newman

In 1862, Henry Mayhew and John Binny walked into eleven of London's most notorious institutions — Newgate, Millbank, Pentonville, Brixton, the prison hulks at Woolwich, Coldbath Fields, Tothill Fields, Wandsworth, Holloway, the House of Detention at Clerkenwell, and Horsemonger Lane — and wrote down exactly what they saw: the governors, the warders, the chaplains, and the prisoners themselves, in their own words.

This edition brings that record back to life. Each chapter has been fully rewritten in modern prose while preserving every fact, every interview, and every argument the original authors made — from their case against purposeless hard labour to their unflinching accounts of the convict nursery, the condemned cell, and the boy discharged from prison with no one waiting at the gate.

A new introduction and retrospective, written for this edition, follows these institutions into the present: which ones were demolished, which became galleries, cathedrals, and post offices — and which are still open today, cited in current inspection reports for the very same overcrowding and neglect that Victorian reformers were fighting a century and a half ago.

What you'll find inside: • Eleven Victorian prisons, reconstructed room by room, cell by cell • Real testimony from governors, chaplains, and prisoners — first offenders and lifelong professionals alike • A frank, often moving record of Victorian London's poorest and most desperate • A new historical retrospective connecting each institution to its fate today

Part social history, part true crime, part uncomfortable mirror — London Prisons: A Retrospective is a door-by-door tour of a city's conscience, then and now.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. p.339.

by Nettly Lucas (Author), Graeme Newman (Introduction)

Step into the hidden London of the 1920s—a city of fashionable hotels and crowded streets, respectable suburbs and shadowy back rooms, Scotland Yard detectives and professional criminals who made deception, burglary, fraud and blackmail their trade.

First published in 1926, London and Its Criminals is Netley Lucas’s remarkable journey through the criminal underworld of interwar London. Rather than simply recounting celebrated crimes, Lucas sets out to describe criminals themselves: how they lived, where they gathered, the methods they used, the slang they spoke, and the elaborate machinery of policing that pursued them.

The result is an extraordinary period portrait of crime and criminal justice.

Lucas takes his readers inside Scotland Yard and its Criminal Record Office, explaining the growing importance of fingerprints, criminal records and systematic detection. From there he ventures into a very different London—the world of professional burglars, pickpockets, confidence tricksters, jewel thieves, forgers, blackmailers and criminal gangs. He introduces his readers to figures he describes as the “Kings” and “Queens” of the Underworld: men and women who move between cheap public houses, prosperous suburban homes, exclusive restaurants and fashionable hotels while living secret criminal lives.

Among the book’s most striking chapters are Lucas’s accounts of “master criminals” and “crooked women.” His characters include expert burglars, ingenious forgers, sophisticated jewel thieves and accomplished confidence tricksters. Some are frightening, some ingenious, some surprisingly ordinary. Again and again Lucas emphasizes the unsettling proximity of the criminal world to respectable society.

Yet London and Its Criminals is more than a gallery of rogues. Lucas was writing at a moment when attitudes toward crime and punishment were beginning to change. He opens the book by discussing the emerging scientific study of crime, criminal psychology, rehabilitation and the limitations of imprisonment—questions that remain central to debates about criminal justice a century later.

Lucas is also an unusually provocative guide. He claims familiarity with criminals themselves and repeatedly describes conversations, meals and encounters with people operating on the wrong side of the law. His London is consequently not the London of official police reports alone. It is a city observed from its restaurants, streets, clubs, pubs, courtrooms and criminal meeting places.

Modern readers should approach some of Lucas’s language, assumptions and sweeping judgments as products of their time. That is also part of the historical importance of the book. It provides a vivid primary-source window into how crime, policing, punishment, class and the urban underworld were represented during the 1920s.

This new Read-Me.Org Classic Reprint presents Lucas’s fascinating account to a new generation of readers, accompanied by a detailed new Introduction by Graeme Newman that places the work in its historical and criminological context.

For readers interested in true crime, criminology, Scotland Yard, policing, criminal history, London history, organized crime and the social history of the 1920s, London and Its Criminals offers a fascinating journey into a vanished—but sometimes surprisingly familiar—criminal world

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. p.194.

A Forgotten Classic of Criminological Thought—Reintroduced for the Twenty-First Century

Originally published in 1918 and now carefully edited and introduced by Graeme R. Newman, The Criminology of Crime and Criminals: Medical, Biological and Psychological restores Charles Mercier’s groundbreaking exploration of crime, punishment, criminal behavior, and social order.

Long before modern criminology embraced concepts such as situational crime prevention, environmental opportunity, offender decision-making, and restorative justice, Mercier argued that crime cannot be explained by biology, psychology, or environment alone. Instead, criminal behavior emerges from the interaction between human nature and circumstance, between personal disposition and criminal opportunity.

Rejecting the popular theories of his day, Mercier challenges the notion of the “born criminal” and dismisses simplistic environmental explanations of lawbreaking. His provocative and highly original analysis examines:

• The psychological foundations of criminal conduct

• The roles of instinct, reason, desire, self-control, and will

• How opportunity and temptation shape criminal action

• The classification of crimes and criminals

• The relationship between crime, morality, and society

• The purposes of punishment: deterrence, retaliation, reform, and reparation

• The prevention, detection, and punishment of crime

Mercier’s central insight—that criminals are not a separate species but ordinary human beings responding differently to circumstances—remains strikingly relevant more than a century later.

Graeme R. Newman’s contemporary introduction places Mercier within the broader history of criminological thought and connects his ideas to modern developments in crime prevention and criminal justice. Together, Mercier and Newman illuminate enduring questions that continue to shape public policy and scholarly debate:

Why do people commit crimes? How should society respond? Is prevention more effective than punishment?

Part intellectual history, part criminological theory, and part social philosophy, this edition offers a fascinating window into the origins of modern criminology and the continuing struggle to understand crime and criminals.

Essential reading for students and scholars of criminology, criminal justice, sociology, psychology, legal history, and anyone interested in the causes of crime and the future of punishment.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. 195p.

by Graeme Newman (Editor), Charles Mercier (Author)

Why do people commit crime? When does mental illness diminish responsibility? Should punishment always follow wrongdoing?

More than a century before modern debates about criminal responsibility, forensic psychiatry, and the treatment of mentally ill offenders, the distinguished British physician Charles Mercier confronted these enduring questions with remarkable clarity and originality.

In Crime, Insanity and Affliction, Mercier explores the complex relationship between criminal behaviour, mental disorder, and human suffering. Rejecting simplistic explanations, he argues that crime cannot be understood apart from the biological, psychological, and social forces that shape human conduct. His examination ranges from drunkenness, epilepsy, intellectual disability, and mental illness to questions of moral responsibility, punishment, and the proper role of the criminal law.

Although written in the early twentieth century, many of Mercier's observations anticipate debates that continue today. His discussion of diminished responsibility, the treatment of mentally ill offenders, addiction, and the limits of punishment remains surprisingly relevant in an era still struggling to balance justice, compassion, and public safety.

This new Read-Me edition presents Mercier's influential work with a new editorial introduction that places his ideas within the development of modern criminology, forensic psychiatry, and criminal justice. It also examines where Mercier's conclusions have been confirmed, where later research has challenged them, and why his work continues to deserve the attention of students, scholars, and general readers alike.

More than a historical curiosity, Crime, Insanity and Affliction is a thoughtful exploration of one of society's oldest and most difficult questions: how should we judge those whose minds, circumstances, or afflictions place them beyond the ordinary boundaries of responsibility?

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. 182p.

A Forgotten Classic of Criminological Thought—Reintroduced for the Twenty-First Century

Originally published in 1918 and now carefully edited and introduced by Graeme R. Newman, The Criminology of Crime and Criminals: Medical, Biological and Psychological restores Charles Mercier’s groundbreaking exploration of crime, punishment, criminal behavior, and social order.

Long before modern criminology embraced concepts such as situational crime prevention, environmental opportunity, offender decision-making, and restorative justice, Mercier argued that crime cannot be explained by biology, psychology, or environment alone. Instead, criminal behavior emerges from the interaction between human nature and circumstance, between personal disposition and criminal opportunity.

Rejecting the popular theories of his day, Mercier challenges the notion of the “born criminal” and dismisses simplistic environmental explanations of lawbreaking. His provocative and highly original analysis examines:

• The psychological foundations of criminal conduct

• The roles of instinct, reason, desire, self-control, and will

• How opportunity and temptation shape criminal action

• The classification of crimes and criminals

• The relationship between crime, morality, and society

• The purposes of punishment: deterrence, retaliation, reform, and reparation

• The prevention, detection, and punishment of crime

Mercier’s central insight—that criminals are not a separate species but ordinary human beings responding differently to circumstances—remains strikingly relevant more than a century later.

Graeme R. Newman’s contemporary introduction places Mercier within the broader history of criminological thought and connects his ideas to modern developments in crime prevention and criminal justice. Together, Mercier and Newman illuminate enduring questions that continue to shape public policy and scholarly debate:

Why do people commit crimes? How should society respond? Is prevention more effective than punishment?

Part intellectual history, part criminological theory, and part social philosophy, this edition offers a fascinating window into the origins of modern criminology and the continuing struggle to understand crime and criminals.

Essential reading for students and scholars of criminology, criminal justice, sociology, psychology, legal history, and anyone interested in the causes of crime and the future of punishment.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. 195p.

The book that criminology forgot — and urgently needs to remember.
Arthur M<ercier (Author). Graeme Newman (Editor and Introduction).

First published in 1918 by the University of London Press, Charles Arthur Mercier's Conduct and Its Disorders, Biologically Considered, published by Macmillan in 1911 is one of the most rigorous, most readable, and most unjustly neglected works in the history of criminological thought. Now reissued as The Biology of Conduct Disorders, with a major critical introduction by Graeme R. Newman, it arrives at a moment when the questions it raises — about criminal intent, biological disposition, the limits of punishment, and the poverty of criminological theory — are more pressing than ever.
Mercier was no armchair theorist. As medical officer of lunatic asylums, consulting physician at criminal trials, and the only systematic student of conduct as a science, he brought to the study of crime a combination of clinical experience and biological rigour that the field had not seen before and has rarely matched since. His target was the prevailing chaos of criminological thought — above all the Continental school of Lombroso, which he dismantled with surgical precision — and his method was the application of praxiology, his own science of conduct, to the specific problem of criminal action.

What Mercier argued — and why it still matters:

• Every criminal act is the product of two factors: an internal factor (the biological constitution of the offender) and an external factor (circumstance and opportunity). Ignoring either produces not criminology but ideology.

• The turpitude of the criminal and the gravity of the crime are entirely separate questions — and confusing them has produced centuries of unjust punishment.

• Punishment should be calibrated to intention, not outcome: the man who intends murder and fails is more culpable than the man who kills by accident, whatever the body count.

• Statistical criminology — mass data gathered from convicted prisoners — cannot produce a science of crime. Only the study of individual criminal action, grounded in biology, psychology, and jurisprudence together, can do that.

• Certain acts currently outside the law (stealing the use of a thing; deliberate breach of contract) deserve criminal status; certain acts currently criminalised do not.

This new edition includes a critical introduction by Graeme R. Newman, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the School of Criminal Justice, University at Albany, and one of the most provocative and original voices in the study of crime, deviance, and punishment. Author of Comparative Deviance: Perception and Law in Six Cultures, The Punishment Response, Just and Painful: A Case for the Corporal Punishment of Criminals, and Civilization and Barbarism: Punishing Criminals in the Twenty-First Century — and, as Colin Heston, of darkly satirical fiction including The Tommie Felon Show, Miscarriages, and Holy Water — Newman brings a unique authority to this text. Writing with the unflinching directness that earned him national television appearances and a reputation as the most uncomfortable conscience in American criminology, he traces the connections between Mercier's 1918 arguments and the debates that have defined — and divided — the field ever since.
"With the exception of logic, there is no subject on which so much nonsense has been written as this of criminality and the criminal." — Charles Arthur Mercier, 1918
Essential reading for students and scholars of criminology, criminal justice, the history of psychiatry, legal theory, and the philosophy of punishment — and for anyone who has ever wondered why, after two centuries of criminal science, we understand so little about why people commit crimes and what we should do about it.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. 208p.

By The International Crisis Group

What’s new? Venezuelan government forces have raided numerous illegal gold mines in the country’s south in recent years, ostensibly to protect the environment. But the truth is that they are exploiting the mines for their own enrichment or allowing armed groups to do so in exchange for a cut of the profits.

Why does it matter? Rising gold prices have fuelled unchecked illegal mining, strengthening Venezuelan criminal enterprises, Colombian guerrilla groups and corrupt elites. The racket destroys fragile ecosystems while also triggering violence against local people and migrant workers, who have been subject to sexual abuse, child labour recruitment and even summary executions.

What should be done? Hard as it is to sway President Nicolás Maduro, foreign governments should use his proclaimed environmental concern and hunger for international legitimacy after the disputed 2024 election to press for curbs on illegal mining and the attendant violence. Buyers, particularly in the Middle East and Asia, should demand conflict-free gold.

By Juan Albarracín, Juan Corredor-Garcia, Juan Pablo Milanese, Inge H. Valencia & Jonas Wolff

Violence in post-conflict settings is often attributed to a post-war boom in organized crime, facilitated by the demobilization of armed groups and the persisting weakness of the state. The article argues that this is only one pathway of post-conflict violence. A second causal pathway emerges from the challenges that peace processes can constitute for entrenched local political orders. By fostering political inclusion, the implementation of peace agreements may threaten subnational political elites that have used the context of armed conflict to ally with armed non-state actors. Violence is then used as a means to preserve such de facto authoritarian local orders. We start from the assumption that these two explanations are not exclusive or competing, but grasp different causal processes that may well both be at work behind the assassination of social leaders (líderes sociales) in Colombia since the 2016 peace agreement with the FARC guerrilla. We argue that this specific type of targeted violence can, in fact, be attributed to different, locally specific configurations that resemble the two pathways. The article combines fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis with the case studies of the municipalities

By Nizar Messari  

 In January 2024, gunmen invaded a TV studio in Ecuador, seized journalists and staff as hostages, and interrupted the regular programs. That episode highlighted the rise of violence in Ecuador, a country that was until very recently calm and peaceful. In this paper, I place the rise of violence in Ecuador within the context of what some refer to as the endemic violence in Latin America. I explore its risks, consequences, and the ways it could be tackled. I also emphasize some of the dramatic aspects of this endemic violence, such as the fact that in Brazil, 76.5% of homicide victims in 2022 were either black or brown, and every day, 62 individuals aged between 15 and 29 are murdered. I also underline one of the main consequences of this violence: according to the UNHCR, because of criminal violence in Latin America and the Caribbean, 42% of the world’s new asylum seekers are from that region.

By Marisa Ross, Susan Burtner, and Andrew Papachristos

Introduction: Community violence intervention street outreach (CVI-SO) strategies are growing in popularity as non-punitive approaches to solving the public health problem of community gun violence. Evidence on the effectiveness of CVI-SO on rates of violence is mixed and faces challenges due to concerns with documentation and data privacy, intentional selection bias in program design, and variation in participant risk and needs. Effective evaluation requires methods that accurately capture the scope and delivery of services, starting with a greater understanding of the services CVI participants receive and how they vary based on individual characteristics.

Methods: This study explores the services that participants received from a coalition of Chicago CVI organizations from 2017–2023. Considering administrative and programmatic data from over 4,000 participants’ nearly 200,000 interactions with providers, the researchers examine patterns in demographics, network-based risk factors, and service provision and dosage. They then use descriptive and latent profile analyses to characterize the “typical” participant in Chicago.

Results: Results show that CVI work relies heavily on long-term mentoring relationships. Service patterns show that latent groups exist with varying dosage: higher dosage participants with higher risk for gun violence receive more frequent contacts over longer periods, demonstrating how organizations adjust their approach based on participant needs. Profiles that primarily receive behavioral or social supports-related services also emerge.

Conclusions: Findings underscore the need for evaluation frameworks that capture both the strategic variation in service delivery and the multiple pathways through which CVI programs influence participant outcomes.

By Yennesit Palacios Valencia and Ignacio García Marín

  Colombia is among the countries with the highest levels of violence and crime in the world, despite the peace agreements between the State and different armed groups, including the FARC. This is partly due to the fact that the Colombian case is complex and multifaceted because of the variety of participants in the armed conflict context and due to the mutation of new actors, under the modality of organized crime. Based on the above, the objective is to study the Colombian reality, contextually and diachronically, from theoretical and epistemological elements to demonstrate how violence and criminality factors intersect in the context of the armed conflict. The study concludes, among other findings, that in Colombia the ambiguity and the multiplicity of terms used to name the emerging criminal groups presents a legal problem because of their hybrid composition and regarding their treatment within or outside of the armed conflict

By Jean Augustin Diégane Tine, Véronique Petit, Mbayang Ndiaye, Hélène Langet

Assessing violence and suicide risk at the population level is essential to inform public health policies and guide prevention efforts for mental health. In Senegal, as in much of sub-Saharan Africa, such data remain scarce. This study aims to fill that gap by estimating the prevalence of violence and suicide risk, and identifying associated factors in the Senegalese population. This nationwide, observational, cross-sectional, population-based analytical survey received ethical approval from Senegal’s National Ethics Committee for Health Research. Conducted between July and August 2023, it covered 496 randomly selected households proportionally distributed by demographic zone. Participants were surveyed on their exposure to different forms of violence, help-seeking behaviours, suicidal ideation and behaviours, and psychiatric history. Data were collected via ODK and analysed in R. Out of 2174 respondents (33.58% youth, 49.95% adults, 16.47% elderly), 52.76% reported exposure to violence, predominantly psychological (47.38%), verbal (43.47%), and physical (32.84%). Co-occurrence was frequent: 37.14% reported combined psychological and physical violence. Age and marital status were strongly linked to violence exposure, with women being more exposed to sexual violence (OR = 1.75 [1.12–2.80]). Dakar was identified as the main violence hotspot. The overall suicide risk was 8.40%, with 1.66% at high risk. Exposure to any form of violence significantly increased suicide risk. Individuals diagnosed with a mental illness were at higher risk (OR = 4.76 [3.13–7.14]). Despite high violence prevalence, support remains rare: only 6.2% received psychological help, 10.4% police assistance. Findings reveal that violence and suicide risk are widespread but insufficiently addressed. The results call for urgent development of a national mental health policy centred on prevention and support for vulnerable groups, especially in the current socio-economic and environmental crisis context.