Violence impacts everyone. Maybe it doesn’t impinge on you directly. Maybe you and your loved ones feel safe most of the time. But the sad reality is, we know that violence is happening all the time, somewhere in our country, our cities, our towns, and our neighborhoods. Sometimes we see it, sometimes we don’t. Sometimes it makes the news; usually it doesn’t.

But even when it’s out of sight, violence has a corrosive impact on us. It diminishes our sense of well-being, our mental and emotional health. Maybe we’d like to ignore it, and to a certain extent, some of us can. But just knowing that violence can happen when we don’t expect it is a factor that bears profoundly on our collective quality of life. And sooner or later, most of us will have some form of direct encounter with violence.

However, we can improve our lives, and the lives of those whom we love, and the community whose lives intersect with our own, by addressing the reality of violence in an unflinching, direct way. For those of us in public service professions, such as social work or law enforcement, various techniques for identifying potential violence and defusing violent situations are essential skills. But also for the rest of us–“civilians” so to speak–there are many things we can do on a habitual basis, and many ways to be aware of ourselves and our fellow citizens, that can lessen the impacts and incidents of violence in our midst. That’s what this manual is about.