Identifying Community Violence Intervention (CVI) Approaches: A Grey Literature Scoping Review
Community violence interventions (CVI) encompass a range of strategies aimed at reducing community firearm violence among those most affected. While CVI is an umbrella term, specific CVI approaches across the United States differ markedly in their underlying theoretical frameworks, specific program activities, and populations served. These different CVI approaches have not been well defined or uniformly understood. Given unprecedented financial support for CVI from local, state, and federal sources in recent years, increased research attention to understanding the implementation and impacts of these programs, and growing efforts by policymakers, practitioners, and community leaders to enact CVI programs, it is important to understand how CVI is defined and characterized in applied discourse (eg, among CVI practitioners, funders, and scholars). This grey literature review aimed to synthesize how CVI practitioners, funders, and scholars commonly characterize CVI approaches and how those approaches relate to previously identified CVI theoretical frameworks. Following processes similar to a scoping review, we conducted a grey literature search to locate and synthesize information from webpages (eg, from community groups and academic organizations) and (non-peer reviewed) reports from web sources discussing CVI approaches. We identified nine main CVI approaches commonly mentioned in applied CVI discourse: 1. Violence interruption/street outreach; 2. Group violence interventions (GVI)/focused deterrence/group violence reduction strategy (GVRS); 3. Hospital-based violence intervention programs (HVIP); 4. Built environment/place-based/Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED); 5. Behavioral science interventions/cognitive behavioral interventions; 6. Victim/trauma/survivor programs/resources; 7. Mentoring/fellowship programs; 8. School-based/related youth interventions; and 9. Diversion/deflection programs. These approaches operated at multiple intervention levels and drew on various theoretical frameworks. Findings from this scoping review provide a timely summary of how CVI is characterized in applied discourse, which can support the field in operating from a shared understanding of what constitutes CVI and, in turn, inform CVI research, practice, and policy-making.
INQUIRY: The Journal of Health Care Organization, Provision, and Financing Volume 62: 1–11