The End of Violence: Eliminating the World’s Most Dangerous Epidemic

A bold new approach for eliminating the world’s most dangerous epidemic―using the same epidemic control playbook that rid the world of other contagious diseases.

Violence is often regarded as an unavoidable fact of life. The truth is far more hopeful: violence is a disease that can be cured.

Here, epidemiologist and violence prevention specialist Dr. Gary Slutkin reclassifies violence as a disease: one that enters the brain and infects people, communities, and countries via the same process as other epidemics. When shootings occur in a school or community, a political figure is assassinated, or an authoritarian leader directs violence in his nation’s own cities, these are not just tragedies, but disease outbreaks that must be interrupted and contained.

As an epidemiologist, Dr. Slutkin led teams to end epidemics of cholera and tuberculosis, then HIV/ AIDS in Africa and Asia with the World Health Organization. Returning to the US, he began to discover the invisible science of violence―and how to contain it using the very same epidemic control methods.

The End of Violence offers a time-tested roadmap for recovery: the playbook that has been used to dramatically reduce or eliminate violence in many of the most dangerous neighborhoods throughout the US and Latin America and has been successfully adapted to curtail political violence, election violence, and gender-based violence in countries around the world.

Domestic violence, mass shootings, state tyranny, and war are all syndromes of the exact same disease, all requiring the same interventions. We already have the tools to protect ourselves, heal our communities, and end violence in our lifetime.

It is now up to us to use them.