such as rehabilitation and reintegration, and attempt to lessen trauma or reduce long-term disability associated with violence. a public health approach emphasizes the primary prevention of violence, i.e. stopping them from occurring in the first place. until recently, this approach has been relatively neglected in the field, with the majority of resources directed towards secondary or tertiary prevention. perhaps the most critical element of a public health approach to prevention is the ability to identify underlying causes rather than focusing upon more visible "symptoms". this allows for the development and testing of effective approaches to address the underlying causes and so improve health. the public health approach is an evidence-based and systematic process involving the following four steps: defining the problem conceptually and numerically, using statistics that accurately describe the nature and scale of violence, the characteristics of those most affected, the geographical distribution of incidents, and the consequences of exposure to such violence. investigating why the problem occurs by determining its causes and correlates, the factors that increase or decrease the risk of its occurrence (risk and protective factors) and the factors that might be modifiable through intervention. exploring ways to prevent the problem by using the above information and designing, monitoring and rigorously assessing the effectiveness of programmes through outcome evaluations. disseminating information on the effectiveness of programmes and increasing the scale of proven effective programmes. approaches to prevent violence, whether targeted at individuals or entire communities, must be properly evaluated for their effectiveness and the results shared. this step also includes adapting programmes to local contexts and subjecting them to rigorous re-evaluation to ensure their effectiveness in the new setting. in many countries, violence prevention is still a new or emerging field in public health. the public health community has started only recently to realize the contributions it can make to reducing violence and mitigating its consequences. in 1949, gordon called for injury prevention efforts to be based on the understanding of causes, in a similar way to prevention efforts for communicable and other diseases. in 1962, gomez, referring to the who definition of health, stated that it is obvious that violence does not contribute to "extending life" or to a "complete state of well-being". he defined violence as an issue that public health experts needed to address and stated that it should not be the primary domain of lawyers, military personnel, or politicians. however, it is only in the last 30 years that public health has begun to address violence, and only in the last fifteen has it done so at the global level. this is a much shorter period of time than public health has been tackling other health problems of comparable magnitude and with similarly severe lifelong consequences. the global public health response to interpersonal violence began in earnest in the mid-1990s. in 1996, the world health assembly adopted resolution wha49.25 which declared violence "a leading worldwide public health problem" and requested that the world health organization (who) initiate public health activities to (1) document and characterize the burden of violence, (2) assess the effectiveness of programmes, with particular attention to women and children and community-based initiatives, and (3) promote activities to tackle the problem at the international and national levels. the world health organization's initial response to this resolution was to create the department of violence and injury prevention and disability and to publish the world report on violence and health (2002). the case for the public health sector addressing interpersonal violence rests on four main arguments. first, the significant amount of time health care professionals dedicate to caring for victims and perpetrators of violence has made them familiar with the problem and has led many, particularly in emergency departments, to mobilize to address it. the information, resources, and infrastructures the health care sector has at its disposal are an important asset for research and prevention work. second, the magnitude of the problem and its potentially severe lifelong consequences and high costs to individuals and wider society call for population-level interventions typical of the public health approach. third, the criminal justice approach, the other main approach to addressing violence (link to entry above), has traditionally been more geared towards violence that occurs between male youths and adults in the street and other public places—which makes up the bulk of homicides in most countries—than towards violence occurring in private settings such as child maltreatment, intimate partner violence and elder abuse—which makes up the largest share of non-fatal violence. fourth, evidence is beginning to accumulate that a science-based public health approach is effective at preventing interpersonal violence. human rights bahrain's pro-democracy protesters killed by military, february 2011 the human rights approach is based on the obligations of states to respect, protect and fulfill human rights and therefore to prevent, eradicate and punish violence. it recognizes violence as a violation of many human rights: the rights to life, liberty, autonomy and security of the person; the rights to equality and non-discrimination; the rights to be free from torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment; the right to privacy; and the right to the highest attainable standard of health. these human rights are enshrined in international and regional treaties and national constitutions and laws, which stipulate the obligations of states, and include mechanisms to hold states accountable. the convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women, for example, requires that countries party to the convention take all appropriate steps to end violence against women. the convention on the rights of the child in its article 19 states that states parties shall take all appropriate legislative, administrative, social and educational measures to protect the child from all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, maltreatment or exploitation, including sexual abuse, while in the care of parent(s), legal guardian(s) or any other person who has the care of the child. geographical context violence, as defined in the dictionary of human geography, "appears whenever power is in jeopardy" and "in and of itself stands emptied of strength and purpose: it is part of a larger matrix of socio-political power struggles". violence can be broadly divided into three broad categories—direct violence, structural violence and cultural violence. thus defined and delineated, it is of note, as hyndman says, that "geography came late to theorizing violence" in comparison to other social sciences. social and human geography, rooted in the humanist, marxist, and feminist subfields that emerged following the early positivist approaches and subsequent behavioral turn, have long been concerned with social and spatial justice. along with critical geographers and political geographers, it is these groupings of geographers that most often interact with violence. keeping this idea of social/spatial justice via geography in mind, it is worthwhile to look at geographical approaches to violence in the context of politics. derek gregory and alan pred assembled the influential edited collection violent geographies: fear, terror, and political violence, which demonstrates how place, space, and landscape are foremost factors in the real and imagined practices of organized violence both historically and in the present. evidently, political violence often gives a part for the state to play. when "modern states not only claim a monopoly of the legitimate means of violence; they also routinely use the threat of violence to enforce the rule of law", the law not only becomes a form of violence but is violence. philosopher giorgio agamben's concepts of state of exception and homo sacer are useful to consider within a geography of violence. the state, in the grip of a perceived, potential crisis (whether legitimate or not) takes preventative legal measures, such as a suspension of rights (it is in this climate, as agamben demonstrates, that the formation of the social democratic and nazi government's lager or concentration camp can occur). however, when this "in limbo" reality is designed to be in place "until further notice…the state of exception thus ceases to be referred to as an external and provisional state of factual danger and comes to be confused with juridical rule itself". for agamben, the physical space of the camp "is a piece of land placed outside the normal juridical order, but it is nevertheless not simply an external space". at the scale of the body, in the state of exception, a person is so removed from their rights by "juridical procedures and deployments of power" that "no act committed against them could appear any longer as a crime"; in other words, people become only homo sacer. guantanamo bay could also be said to represent the physicality of the state of exception in space, and can just as easily draw man as homo sacer. in the 1970s, genocides in cambodia under the khmer rouge and pol pot resulted in the deaths of over two million cambodians (which was 25% of the cambodian population), forming one of the many contemporary examples of state-sponsored violence. about fourteen thousand of these murders occurred at choeung ek, which is the best-known of the extermination camps referred to as the killing fields. the killings were arbitrary; for example, a person could be killed for wearing glasses, since that was seen as associating them with intellectuals and therefore as making them part of the enemy. people were murdered with impunity because it was no crime; cambodians were made homo sacer in a condition of bare life. the killing fields—manifestations of agamben's concept of camps beyond the normal rule of law—featured the state of exception. as part of pol pot's "ideological intent…to create a purely agrarian society or cooperative", he "dismantled the country's existing economic infrastructure and depopulated every urban area". forced movement, such as this forced movement applied by pol pot, is a clear display of structural violence. when "symbols of cambodian society were equally disrupted, social institutions of every kind…were purged or torn down", cultural violence (defined as when "any aspect of culture such as language, religion, ideology, art, or cosmology is used to legitimize direct or structural violence") is added to the structural violence of forced movement and to the direct violence, such as murder, at the killing fields. vietnam eventually intervened and the genocide officially ended. however, ten million landmines left by opposing guerillas in the 1970s continue to create a violent landscape in cambodia. human geography, though coming late to the theorizing table, has tackled violence through many lenses, including anarchist geography, feminist geography, marxist geography, political geography, and critical geography. however, adriana cavarero notes that, "as violence spreads and assumes unheard-of forms, it becomes difficult to name in contemporary language". cavarero proposes that, in facing such a truth, it is prudent to reconsider violence as "horrorism"; that is, "as though ideally all the…victims, instead of their killers, ought to determine the name". with geography often adding the forgotten spatial aspect to theories of social science, rather than creating them solely within the discipline, it seems that the self-reflexive contemporary geography of today may have an extremely important place in this current (re)imaging of violence, exemplified by cavarero. epidemiology estimates of disability-adjusted life years from physical violence, per 100,000 inhabitants in 2002. no data <200 200–400 400–600 600–800 800–1000 1000–1200 1200–1400 1400–1600 1600–1800 1800–2000 2000–3000 >3000 deaths due to interpersonal violence per million persons in 2012 0–8 9–16 17–24 25–32 33–54 55–75 76–96 97–126 127–226 227–878 as of 2010, all forms of violence resulted in about 1.34 million deaths up from about 1 million in 1990. suicide accounts for about 883,000, interpersonal violence for 456,000 and collective violence for 18,000. deaths due to collective violence have decreased from 64,000 in 1990. by way of comparison, the 1.5 millions deaths a year due to violence is greater than the number of deaths due to tuberculosis (1.34 million), road traffic injuries (1.21 million), and malaria (830'000), but slightly less than the number of people who die from hiv/aids (1.77 million). for every death due to violence, there are numerous nonfatal injuries. in 2008, over 16 million cases of non-fatal violence-related injuries were severe enough to require medical attention. beyond deaths and injuries, forms of violence such as child maltreatment, intimate partner violence, and elder maltreatment have been found to be highly prevalent. self-directed violence in the last 45 years, suicide rates have increased by 60% worldwide. suicide is among the three leading causes of