Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake announced Baltimore’s participation in National Youth Violence Prevention Week during her media availability on March 18. (AFRO Photo/Roberto Alejandro)
Baltimore will participate in National Youth Violence Prevention Week, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake recently announced.
National Youth Violence Prevention Week is a week-long national education initiative that will run from March 23 to March 27.
“This nationwide, week-long initiative will bring partners together to identify strategies to combat youth violence, to promote the positive role that we can have in making our communities safer for our young people,” said Rawlings-Blake. “And this year’s focus aims to bring voices of young people, especially the voices of young Black men, into the forefront of our public safety dialogue.”
Fifteen persons under the age of 18 were killed in Baltimore last year, a trend about which the city should not grow complacent, the mayor said.
“When young people are still either victims or perpetrators of violence, we are called upon to do even more to protect them,” said Rawlings-Blake.
Baltimore City Health Commissioner Dr. Leana Wen also spoke at the announcement, saying violence needed to be viewed through the prism of public health.
“I want us to think about violence as we do flu or the measles,” said Wen. “That it’s something that’s infectious, it’s spread from person to person, it causes fear, it wreaks havoc, but just the same it’s something that can be prevented.”
Wen said that a criminal justice-based approach to reducing violence only focuses on the end result (when a homicide has already been committed, for example), which limits points of intervention.
“We look at our 16-year-olds, or even our three-year-olds who are shot, and we see many common trends that happen in their lives prior to them getting to where they are now,” she said. “And it’s looking at those trends and finding out what it is that we can do on the front end, not just seeing what it is that we can do the moment that they come in with a homicide, but looking at what can we do on the front end? What are the systemic issues that we have to address?”
ralejandro@afro.com
