Michael Ungar

Addressing Youth Violence and Aggression in Colombia: Examining a Community-Wide Prevention Initiative

Set in the Aburra Valley of the Colombian Andes, the Metropolitan Area of Medellin comprises 10 municipalities and 4.6 million inhabitants. As elsewhere in Colombia, violence has been a significant public health problem for the past two decades (Duque, 2000b; Franco, 2003). In order to promote nonviolence among children and adolescents, the Mede11in Early Prevention of Aggression Program (MEPAP) was initiated in 2001. MEPAP was part of a larger program, the Medellin Civic Coexistence Program, funded by the Medellin municipality and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). This larger program had five objectives: (1) to prevent aggressive behavior among children and youth; (2) to strengthen justice mechanisms; (3) to develop the mass media as promoters of citizenship and civil coexistence; (4) to observe and monitor occurrences of violence; and (5) to ensure community ownership of the program. Its design was directed by one of this chapter’s authors, L. F. Duque, following consultations with 80 public, private, and community institutions and more than 500 individual local leaders. These consultations had identified violence as one of the four main obstacles hindering the economic development of Medellin (Duque, 2000a). Participants involved in the consultations recommended violence prevention initiatives at the local and national levels of government.