Enhancing Data Collection and Integration to Reduce Health Harms and Inequalities Linked to Violence

Existing research has demonstrated the link between violence and wide-ranging societal and health harms, extending beyond the immediate harms to physical health. Research on intimate partner violence, particularly, has highlighted profound and long-lasting mental health consequences, as well as financial, social and family-related harms, including impacts on employment and economic wellbeing, educational achievements and career attainments, housing stability and homelessness. Experiences of violence disproportionately affects various groups, influenced by factors such as age, gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic and disability status.

Multiple institutions have a role in preventing and responding to violence, including health services, criminal and civil law, third sector services and governmental bodies. These sectors differ in how they conceptualise and measure violence, making it difficult to evaluate interventions and thus limit our understanding of violence and its impact.

This Research Topic focuses on measuring violence, particularly regarding health inequalities. It seeks to highlight innovations in cross-sector harmonization and adaptation of metrics to improve intervention evaluation and reduce violence.

Addressing and reducing violence and health inequalities is essential for mitigating their detrimental effects on society. Two interrelated questions are key to this. Firstly, it is necessary to identify effective interventions for various forms of violence across different demographic groups. Secondly, while a correlation exists between social inequalities and violence, challenges remain in clarifying the causal pathways influenced by socio-economic, gender, and ethnic disparities, which interact through multiple social systems.

A robust evidence base is crucial for these objectives. Overcoming fragmentation arising from diverse measurement systems and conceptualizations of violence requires collaboration among academics, professionals, and individuals with lived experience. This cooperation is key to improving the consistency and accuracy of violence data, as well as expanding access to data from various sources, including surveys and routinely collected administrative data. Linking data across services and surveys is increasingly recognized as a pivotal strategy for enhancing the evidence base. Improved data will aid in identifying connections between violence and ill health, thereby informing decision-makers and guiding priorities for public expenditure.

This Research Topic is interested in measuring violence and health inequalities and evaluating the effectiveness of interventions to prevent and reduce violence. This includes any type of violence (e.g. physical, non-physical, technology-facilitated) and impacts on both physical and mental health, the social and economic impact, along with the experiences of marginalised groups, considering factors like age, gender, ethnicity, disability and religion and how these intersect.

Manuscripts can utilise data from existing sources or collect and analyse primary data (quantitative or qualitative). Cross-sector (e.g. health services, justice services, specialist third sector services, welfare and governance) and cross-disciplinary work (sociology, criminology, public health and beyond) is encouraged, as is research that engages with people with lived experience.

We welcome conceptual reviews, methodological papers, empirical studies and systematic reviews on the themes of violence, health inequalities, the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of interventions, outcome measurement, data harmonisation, data linkage approaches and related topics.

Keywords: Violence Measurement, Data Integration, Intervention Strategies, Health Disparities, Cross-Sector Collaboration

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.