Targeted and Situational Prevention of Physical Violence: In Response to Eisner’s and Homel’s Comments

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I first want to thank Manuel Eisner and Ross Homel for having taken the time to read my paper and write a comment. I value very much their reflections for many reasons, including the following: (a) their training in mathematics (Homel) and sociology (Eisner) comforts my scientific anxieties and my lack of training in sociology; (b) their work on adult criminality should reassure traditional criminologists; (c) their dedication to prevention should make them credible to policy makers. It is heartening to read that they agree so much with my crusade to convince criminologists that they should seriously consider human development before adolescence, and especially before school entry. The fact that their main criticism converges so much also makes my response easier. Both Eisner and Homel stress the fact that, although early intervention is important for preventing the development of chronic violence, later interventions can also have important impact. The term chronic here is important. By chronic violence, I mean an individual who uses physical aggression much more frequently than his or her age group over many years. The recent data from numerous longitudinal studies is showing more and more clearly that adolescents and adults who chronically use physical aggression had that problem in early childhood and elementary school. There may be the odd cases who suffered some form of brain damage or who find themselves in very exceptional circumstances for long periods of time. Besides these odd cases, if there are no late-onset chronically violent individuals, then it stands to reason that effective early intervention would prevent the large majority of these cases. Why would we wait? And why would we expect that later interventions will be more cost effective than later ones? I completely agree that it is never too late to help. Our Montreal prevention experiment with aggressive–hyperactive elementary school boys from poor neighbourhoods showed that we could have a long-term impact on trajectories of physical aggression even if the intervention started at 7 years of age (Lacourse et al. 2002; Tremblay et al. 1995; Vitaro et al. 2001). But why wait until elementary school when we can give the support during the preschool years? It would save the child, his or her family, peers and neighbours so much misery. There is also good evidence that the cost would be much less and the benefits much Eur J Crim Policy Res (2007) 13:179–181 DOI 10.1007/s10610-007-9049-0