Community Safety Promotion

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 Defining Community Safety:    

Community safety is achieved when all issues leading to harm, or fear of harm, and crime, are prevented or controlled.  Community Safety Promotion is a holistic safety term that entails all injury related issues, including, but not limited to, those resulting from crime and antisocial behaviours.

Community safety = injury prevention + crime prevention

Promoting safety and preventing injuries have wide spreading advantages.   Remaining injury free invites considerable benefits for the entire community, individual organisations, business, families and all people. 

In order to improve community safety, cultural and socio-economic determinants of injury, local circumstances and resources need to be understood and factored into community safety initiatives.

Best Practice Models of Community Safety Promotion:

The most effective models of community safety promotion and injury prevention are sustainable interventions which incorporate collaborative approaches across multiple and diverse community sectors.    Some of the more internationally recognised models are:

  • Intersectorial Collaboration: collaboration, coordinated efforts and working partnerships between local and/or national government and non-government agencies.
  • Safety Promotion: development of a sustainable and safe environment and culture for everyone on all levels physically, mentally and socially.
  • Active and Passive Strategies: specific actions and interventions to make people safer/strategies to create safer environments so people are safer without having to take any specific actions.
  • Spectrum of Prevention: consists of seven action strategies –building a solid base of information; fostering coalitions and networks; strengthening knowledge and skills; raising public awareness/changing attitudes; up-skilling providers; changing organisational practices; and influencing policy and legislation.
  • The 5 Es: Education, Enforcement, Engineering, Environment, Evaluation.
  • Haddon’s Matrix: tool to identify factors leading to both injury and opportunities to break the causal chain of events, based on analysis of hazards involved before, during and after an event that causes injury.
  • Safe Communities Model: Framework for community safety promotion and injury prevention at the local level which involves building partnerships through community consultation and key stakeholders working collaboratively to collect data, identify priorities and implement coordinated strategies specific to that community’s identified needs. 

The Safe Communities model is an internationally recognised and evidence based best practice model for community safety promotion.  ICCWA encourages individual communities and Local Government Authorities to take time to learn more on the Safe Communities philosophy and consider implementing the concepts for safety promotion and injury prevention in their communities.

Building Capacity in Community Safety Promotion:

The aim of capacity building is to establish networks and compile information across multiple community sectors to create opportunities for the sharing and coordination of resources.   In addition to community engagement and developing partnerships between multiple stakeholders, capacity building allows for coordinated and targeted approaches from all stakeholders across all community sectors.  To effectively target community safety approaches to priority groups and priority concerns, it is imperative to collect appropriate injury surveillance data.   This requires establishing accurate and sustainable data collection sources which provide information at the local level and can be compared over time or benchmarked against other existing data.

Building community capacity can be described as a form of community development in that building capacity acquires environmental, economic and social returns.  Building the capacity of a community strengthens its ability to instigate structures, systems and skills to take action around community issues in a sustainable approach.  Effective and sustainable capacity building requires active participation and support from multiple sectors across the entire community, including community members themselves. 

ICCWA’s core business covers multiple community safety issues across many at risk population groups.  Through implementing and coordinating many community engagement projects, ICCWA helps build capacity at local, state and national levels to promote safety practices and reduce the burden of injury.  As an integral component of our key project work and core business, ICCWA provides support to local communities and assists them in building their own capacity to prevent injury and promote community safety practices for their regions.  More information and examples of how ICCWA can work as a supporting organisation with other communities is available at the ‘ICCWA as a Supporting organisation’ link.