Plans of GUNS DOWN, UNN-BLADE:

 

To provide

• Educational initiatives focusing on keeping young children away from guns

• Encourage youth to resolve disputes without using weapons

• Create media promotions, such as our PROHIBITED WEAPONS campaigns, mass mailings or public announcements

 

Actions GUNS DOWN, UNN-BLADE are taking

 

We are asking schools:

 

To provide

• School-based programmes, such as counselling, peer mediation and Conflict resolution programmes

• Community-based initiatives such as gun-free school zones and community revitalisation

• Programmes using peers as educators

• Educational packages, delivered in schools and designed to inform about the consequences of having guns and of gang membership

• Placing a police officer in English schools in ‘crime hot spots’, areas

• Improving the basic education, employment skills and confidence of disaffected young people, Mentoring Plus constituted one-to-one mentoring with adult local volunteers, plus structured education and careers support.

• Metal detectors in schools

• intervening in children’s lives as early as possible, to control or avoid harmful events or circumstances. Primary prevention focuses on structural conditions like poverty and economic inequality. Secondary prevention focuses on early intervention for at risk children and their families (or young people at risk of (re)offending).

• School programmes which aim at addressing or preventing violence include a variety of initiatives, for example: social skills training, tutoring, anger management, impulse control and bullying prevention.

• behavioural strategies (e.g. rewards, good behaviour ‘contracts’)

• Programmes where students are supervised and positive behaviour (e.g. attendance and academic progress) reinforced are among the ones which have been proven effective

• cash incentives for disadvantaged students to graduate

   

We are encouraging parents to:

​

• Encourage youths to resolve disputes without using weapons

• Intervene in children’s lives as early as possible, to control or avoid harmful events or circumstances. Primary prevention focuses on structural conditions like poverty and economic inequality. Secondary prevention focuses on early intervention for at risk children and their families (or young people at risk of (re)offending).

• Take early parent training

• Put in place behavioural strategies (e.g. rewards, good behaviour ‘contracts’)

 

We are asking police forces:

​

To provide

• Laws and programmes encouraging parents to store their guns safely

• Run a two-day, two-hour programme targeted to grades 7-8 pupils and presented by a doctor, a police officer and prosecutor, who can explain the medical and legal consequences of gun/knife violence using graphic depictions of gunshot victims and aim at deterring children by ‘shocking’ them into resisting future gun use

 

Future plans

 

We want hospitals to:

​

Provide

• Sessions for nurses to offer counselling, advice and information to patients to help them understand how they got the injury in the first place and to help prevent them incurring further injuries.

 

We will ask Social Services & Health Visitors to:

​

Provide

• Mentors to meet with six to 18- year-old children from single-parent, disadvantaged households, at least three times a month for three to five hours to reduce the likelihood of drug and alcohol use, violence and truancy, especially among young people from black and ethnic minorities

• Intervention in children’s lives as early as possible, to control or avoid harmful events or circumstances and focus on structural conditions like poverty and economic inequality. Secondary prevention focuses on early intervention for at risk children and their families (or young people at risk of (re)offending)

• Cognitive techniques (which focuses on changing thinking skills: e.g. problem solving, anger control) social skills training (e.g. communication skills, conflict management) counselling and therapy (group, individual or family) peer mediation parent training (including skills training and family group counselling).

 

We will ask Job Centres to:

​

Provide

• Interventions such as public jobs creation, policies to tackle low wages and pay differentials, redistribution of work time and other employment related policies; ‘more generous, universal social services’ (e.g. Currie 1998); better integration of housing and urban planning