Editors: Jaimee Mallion and Erika Gebo

The World Health Organization (2002) classified violence as a leading international public health problem that requires immediate intervention. Violence is a pervasive social problem whose causes and consequences are inextricably linked to individuals, families, institutions, communities, and societies. The negative consequences of violence, and serious violence in particular, reverberate beyond the immediate moment and location of it. By bringing together partners with varied skills, whole-system multi-agency approaches are advocated as the leading means of targeting serious violence. With this context in mind, this Special Issue examines a variety of collaborative, community-based approaches to preventing and reducing serious violence across the global landscape. The contributions from practitioners and researchers focus on the prevention and reduction of serious interpersonal violence in communities. The typologies of serious violence discussed by the collaborators include gang membership, domestic violence, and sexual violence. The contributions address the collaborative nature of serious violence prevention work, recognizing that violence is multi-causal and that solutions are needed across various socio-ecological domains. The contributions describe community-level collaborative approaches to preventing and reducing serious violence. The successes and lessons learned from the approaches are identified, and the applicability of the approaches to other areas are explored.

Editor: Dennis Rodgers

Through biographical investigations of gang members' life histories, this open access book illustrates the range of causes, motivations, and consequences associated with being a gang member.

Gangs are one of a small number of truly global social phenomena, present across time and space all over the world. Partly as a result of this ubiquity, gangs are inherently revealing social institutions, and can be connected to a range of fundamental human activities, such as the exercise of power, capital accumulation, socialization, identity formation, territorialization, or the articulation of gender relations, amongst others.

At the same time, however, gangs are also frequently associated with an almost pathological form of violence, generally represented as engaging in senseless forms of brutality, and gangsters are popular
global scapegoats. Such representations make it all the more urgent to understand what it is that truly motivates individuals to become gang members, why they undergo particular trajectories, and what the
long-term consequences of gang membership might be.

Through a comparison of thirteen life histories of gang members from twelve different countries around the world, this book offers a nuanced and sensitive overview of the global gang experience. Life histories are ideal lenses through which to explore these issues due to their ability to simultaneously reflect both the uniqueness and the embedded complexity of gang lives, but also their capacity to offer fundamentally relatable portraits that elicit empathy and humanize individuals.