The Institute of Medicine (IOM) held a workshop in April 2011 designed to analyze the socioeconomic costs of violence within society. The IOM’s Forum on Global Violence Prevention led the workshop in examining different aspects in the direct and indirect price of violence. The workshop analyzed the costs of violence at four different levels: “individual, family, community, and societal.”
The IOM recently released a report summarizing the workshop. The report includes the difficulty of measuring social and economic costs of violence, the effectiveness of violence prevention, and an analysis of direct and indirect costs of violence. Indirect costs include the burden that communities bear upon their health care and legal systems as well as many hard to measure costs upon the victims themselves. Furthermore, societies can be affected by violence “through loss of social cohesion [and] financial divestment,” among other factors. This workshop sought to address these costs and discuss ways to lower the societal and economic burden of violence.
Compiled from: Social and Economic Costs of Violence- Workshop Summary (25 October 2011).