The Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence was founded in 1992 and is now housed within the Program on Problem Behavior and Positive Youth Development within the Institute of Behavioral Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. Among the programs and projects of the CSPV is the Blueprints for Healthy Youth Development initiative which provides a registry of experimentally proven programs that are demonstrated to be "effective in preventing or reducing the likelihood of antisocial behavior and promoting a healthy course of youth development and adult maturity". The Blueprints initiative evaluates the programs through a systematic review process and classifies accepted ones into three classes: "Promising" for interventions that have met the minimum standards of effectiveness; "Model" interventions that have met a higher standard and thus provide a "greater confidence in the program’s capacity to change behavior and targeted outcomes", and "Model-Plus" interventions that have not only met the highest Blueprints standards but have been externally evaluated through published peer-reviewed journal articles. More than 150 programs and projects have been submitted for review and 94 have achieved one of the three labeled classes. An early program of the Center was the VioLit database -- the first internationalliterature database of scholarly literature on violence prevention. During the early to mid-2000s violence research in the United States became controversial and many funding sources ended their support for these projects. In 2013 as funding within the CSPV ended for this project the leaders collaborated with SafetyLit to continue and expand the VioLit database.
History
Until the early to mid-1980s in the United States and much of the world, injuries were thought to be caused by carelessness or bad luck. In 1983, the U.S. Congress enacted legislation authorized funding the U.S. Department of Transportation in partnership with the National Academy of Sciences to conduct a formal study to 1) determine what was then known about injury causes and consequences; 2) areas to prioritize for injury prevention research; and 3) the role of the US federal government agencies in improving knowledge about the causes of serious injuries and their prevention. At the same time that Congress recognized that the injury problem was not insoluble researchers at universities began to publish books on the public health approach to preventing injuries. With this new recognition that injuries were not only the result of unavoidable accidents, U.S. agencies began funding research and prevention programs within universities and state governments. The Center for the Study and Pevention of Violence at teh University of Colorado at Boulder was one of the early university-based centers. It was founded in 1992 by Dr. Delbert S. Elliott and was among the first injury research centers to focus primarily on interpersonal violence research and prevention. Since that founding through June 2020, the Center has led over 75 comprehensive school and community initiatives in Colorado and across the nation, totaling over $80 million dollars. It currently supports more than 35 full-time faculty and staff. The CSPV works closely with other national institutes and centers to further the building of bridges between the research community and practitioners and policy makers to help make communities and schools safe for children, parents, and teachers.
