CGNK at Violence Prevention Alliance meeting in Cape Town
The Center for Global Nonkilling participated on September 6-7 in the Violence Prevention Alliance (VPA) 5th Milestones of a Global Campaign for Violence Prevention Meeting: “Joining forces, empowering prevention”, organized in Cape Town, South Africa, by the World Health Organization.
Almost 300 experts from more than 60 countries discussed progress in WHO’s Global Campaign for Violence Prevention and strategized the way ahead by presenting new evidence on effective interventions to prevent interpersonal violence addressing through joint programming the underlying risk factors for different forms of violence. This join programming requires increased collaboration between different sectors, including health, social protection, and criminal justice.
CGNK, that was represented by its Research Team Leader Joám Evans Pim, who is also part of the VPA work group to set a research agenda in the field of global violence prevention. The work group had a meeting during the Milestones conference and shared the survey which is ready to be applied before the end of this year.
Since it was launched in January 2004, the VPA has grown from a dozen participants to almost 50 today. The Center for Global Nonkilling joined in 2009, with another six participants, including UN organizations such as UNDP, UNICEF, and UNODC. The VPA Milestones meetings engage not only VPA members but experts from many other organizations from arround the world. CGNK used this opportunity to present its work among participants from all over Africa, Europe and the Americas finding common ground for future collaborations in the fields of research, education, policy and action.
The Milestones conference also attracted several satellite meetings, including an international symposium on methodological and ethical issues in the international epidemiology of child sexual abuse, supported by the UBS Optimus Foundation; a meeting on violence prevention and policing supported by the Open Society Institute, and the first conference of the newly-launched University of Cape Town’s Safety and Violence Initiative, in which the pioneering efforts of the Provincial Government of the Western Cape were presented.
