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Commercial determinants of violence highlighted at World Safety Conference by Prof Mark Bellis

    This September, on behalf of the VISION research consortium and Liverpool John Moores University, Professor Mark Bellis gave the plenary violence prevention address to World Safety Conference in in New Delhi, India.

    World Safety 2024 is the World Health Organization’s biennial global conference on injury prevention and safety promotion, covering all aspects of violence and unintentional injury.

    Mark’s plenary dealt with the commercial determinants of violence based on a paper published earlier this year with his VISION colleagues, Professor Sally McManus and Dr Olumide Adisa, and others.

    In his presentation, Mark outlined how, as well as governments, public sector organisations and charities, commercial organisations also have a major part to play in the prevention of violence. The plenary considered commercial influence on violence through political, scientific, marketing supply/waste chain, labour & employment financial and reputational management practices. For some industries such as the arms and alcohol industries their relationships the causes of violence are already relatively well understood. However, mining, financial, social media, clothing and other manufacturing industries are also contributors to a growing violence problem.

    The plenary presentation addressed commercial impacts on child maltreatment, sexual and domestic violence, youth violence and elder abuse. It also explored how companies can, and should, move from being part of the violence problem to leaders in implementing solutions. 

    Companies and commercial processes shape violence

      VISION seeks to highlight the wider contexts in which violence occurs. To tackle the causes of violence and improve violence reduction strategies, governments tend to look to families, communities, schools, health and justice services, and community and voluntary sector organisations for solutions. While these are crucial, a broader and more radical approach is also needed.

      For decades, health researchers have raised awareness of various ‘commercial determinants of health’. Initially, this work focused on industries producing harmful products like tobacco, alcohol, fast food and fossil fuels. However, the approach has expanded to show how a much wider range of companies and industries harm our health through their various practices.

      We applied an existing framework to unpack the specific ways in which companies and commercial processes might shape not only our health – but also the nature and extent of violence in societies. The analysis was carried out by Kat Ford from the Public Health Collaborating Unit at Bangor University, Karen Hughes from Policy and International Health, World Health Organization Collaborating Centre on Investment for Health and Wellbeing, Public Health Wales, and VISION researchers Mark Bellis, Olumide Adisa and Sally McManus.

      A summary of six of the ways in which companies can fuel violence has been published in The Conversation. They include political practices like lobbying against safety legislation, and financial practices like investing in regimes with poor human rights records. The full paper details these and other commercial processes and argues that governments need to consider the role and influence of companies if violence prevention is to be effective.

      Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash