Introduction to the Special Issue on Structural Approaches to Youth Violence Prevention: Addressing Racism and Discrimination.

Youth violence is a significant public health concern, for which a number of preventive approaches have demonstrated promise in reducing the overall harm and associated effects. Yet relatively few of those approaches have explicitly addressed the role of structural racism and discrimination, which is a potential root cause of youth violence. This paper introduces a special issue of Prevention Science, "Structural Approaches to Youth Violence Prevention: Addressing Racism and Discrimination," which includes a collection of original papers from multiple disciplines that outline promising approaches for advancing prevention science in this important and timely direction. The overarching goal of the special issue is to provide insights related to youth violence prevention by directly addressing racism and discrimination at the structural level. The papers in this issue include systematic reviews, proposed approaches to policy and practice, intervention development and process, and evaluation research. After identifying common themes across the papers, we conclude with some future directions for research on structural interventions for youth violence prevention.