Community Violence Prevention Modeling

This project represents the first application of system dynamics (SD) modeling to understand and address community-level violence against children in El Salvador and Honduras. Initiated through a collaboration between Johns Hopkins University and World Vision, with support from USAID’s Victims of Torture Fund, the project aimed to quantify the dynamic, context-specific relationships among violence prevalence, its drivers, impacts, and potential prevention strategies. The team developed fully quantified SD models for each country by integrating stakeholder-informed causal loop diagrams with empirical data. These models offer a novel way to simulate and evaluate complex feedback loops involved in violence prevention and inform policy and program design at both national and subnational levels.