This section offers definitions of terms that appear in this module. They are presented in alphabetical order.

Best Available Research Evidence:  Information derived from scientific inquiry that assists in determining whether or not a prevention program, practice, or policy is actually achieving its intended outcomes. Meaning, did it do what it was supposed to do? The more rigorous the evaluation in its research design, (e.g., randomized control trials, quasi-experimental designs with matched comparison groups), its implementation (e.g., fidelity), and the extent to which it has been replicated in different settings and with different populations, the more compelling the research evidence, indicating whether or not a program, practice, or policy is effectively preventing violence. Best available research evidence can also help to determine whether or not a prevention strategy is harmful.

Concentrated disadvantage: The phenomenon of spatial clustering of economically or socially disadvantaged individuals within a set of neighborhoods and the resulting feedback effects that exacerbate the problems of poverty. The central concept is the disproportionate share of disadvantaged persons in geographic neighborhoods lacking critical resources, such as access to quality healthcare and quality education.

Contextual Evidence: A collection of measurable factors in the community that may impact the success of a prevention strategy (e.g., community history, organizational capacity, social norms, etc.). The role that contextual evidence plays in the evidence-based decision-making process is to provide information to help determine whether a prevention strategy is likely to be acceptable, feasible, and useful in a local setting. Contextual evidence can be gathered from variety of local data sources and offers a "snapshot" of measurable community characteristics that may impact a particular decision. Some examples of data sources and methods for collecting contextual evidence include census data, local administrative data (hospital, school, and law enforcement), community needs/assets assessments, surveys, and focus groups/interviews.

Criminal legal system: Laws that define what actions are considered a crime, what actions are not, and the systems for policing, prosecuting, adjudicating, and punishing people to enforce these laws. Structural racism is embedded within the criminal legal system in the U.S.  The term criminal legal system is used in this brief, rather than criminal justice system. This is to clarify that the criminal legal system is focused on enforcement of laws, rather than on ensuring justice and fairness from the perspective of equity or morality.

Distributional Justice: Distributional justice means fair distribution of resources, benefits, and burdens, and prioritizes resources for communities experiencing the greatest inequities. Distributional equity is often the first thing people think about when they think about equity because it is the most quantifiable or tangible. Distributional equity is guided by quantitative and qualitative data and allocates goods, services, and other resources in a manner that creates fair opportunities for health and well-being for all.

Experiential Evidence: The collective experience and expertise of those who have practiced or lived in a particular setting. It also includes the knowledge of subject matter experts. These insights, understandings, skills, and expertise are accumulated over time and are often referred to as intuitive or tacit knowledge. Experiential evidence is systematically gathered from multiple stakeholders who are familiar with a variety of key aspects about populations in specific settings who have knowledge about the community in which a prevention strategy is to be implemented (i.e., knowledge about what has/has not worked previously in a specific setting with particular populations; insight on potential implementation challenges; insight regarding the needs and challenges of the community and those who live in it). Experiential evidence provides distinctive guidance in the form of real-world experience. Some examples of data sources and methods for eliciting experiential evidence include reflective questions, communities of practice, expert panels, team decision making, and other consensus processes.

Narratives: Narratives are shared stories about the way the world works, helping to shape public consciousness, including our collective values and senses of responsibility and possibility.

Phenotype: An 'individual's observable traits, such as height, eye color and blood type. A person's phenotype is determined by both their genomic makeup (genotype) and environmental factors.

Procedural Justice: Procedural justice refers to transparent, fair, and inclusive processes that provide additional opportunities for those who are disproportionately impacted. These values of transparency, fairness, and inclusion apply to who participates, how participants are engaged, and how input is valued. Procedural justice involves acknowledging imbalances in power and technical expertise that often exist when historically marginalized communities engage with public agencies in decision-making.

Power: Power is the capacity to achieve a purpose. Because communities of color have faced intentional, structural, and sustained discrimination, violence, exploitation, and denial of opportunities, power-building is explicitly included within community violence prevention strategies. These approaches will look different in each community, but many of the most successful approaches draw on culturally based knowledge and practices, values, and traditions. By engaging community members across generations, these practices help communities reconnect to, reaffirm, and celebrate cultural identity and build community cohesion.

Power Building: Power-building includes civic engagement, and education and capacity building on topics such as policy and budget advocacy. Community organizing and power-building build the capacity of oppressed communities to stand up to structural racism and apply pressure for change.

Racial Justice: Racial justice is the systematic fair treatment of people of all races that results in equitable opportunities and outcomes for everyone. All people are able to achieve their full potential in life, regardless of race, ethnicity, or the community in which they live. Achieving racial justice involves processes that lead toward truth and reconciliation, justice, and fairness, including the redistribution and sharing of power and resources to rectify the compounding effects of historic and present day policies and practices rooted in discrimination and exclusion. Racial justice has structural, procedural, distributional dimensions. Racial justice can be said to have been achieved when structural inequities between racial groups have been eliminated and whereby phenotype no longer serves as a predictor of health, safety, and other outcomes. Racial justice processes entail the elimination and reversal of policies, practices, norms, and messages that create differential outcomes based on phenotype, and transformation of the systems and structures that uphold inequities health and safety outcomes between whites and non-whites. Racial inequities in community violence are rooted in structural racism, and therefore, community safety needs to be rooted in racial justice. In other words, racial justice can be understood as a social determinant of community safety. In communities and societies characterized by racial justice, the protective conditions that promote safety in the places where people of color live, learn, work, are distributed equitably. In such communities and societies, racial inequities in community violence affecting adolescents and young adults are eliminated, thereby substantially reducing the burden of community violence.

Racism: Racism is a system of structuring opportunity and assigning value based on phenotype that unfairly disadvantages some individuals and communities, unfairly advantages other individuals and communities, and saps the strength of the whole society through the waste of human resources.

Social Determinant of Health (SDOH): Conditions in the places where people live, learn, work and play that affect a wide range of health and quality-of-life risks and outcomes.  The SDOH framework makes the invisible visible by elucidating the relationship between structural and intermediate determinants of health, inequity, and health outcomes.  The WHO cautions that addressing social determinants of health alone may reinforce disparities if we do not also address the structural forces that create more or less advantaged population groups due to inequitable distributions of social determinants.

Social Determinant of Violence: A social determinant of violence can be thought of as the conditions in the places where people live, learn, work, and play that affect a wide range of violence and safety outcomes; in other words, structural or social determinants that positions communities for differential risk of experiencing violence.

Structural Justice: Structural justice addresses underlying structural factors and policies that gave rise to inequities and commits to correcting past harms and preventing future unintended consequences. While more difficult to measure than the other types of equity, structural equity is no less important. Structural equity exposes deep factors related to power that perpetuate disadvantage within systems and then reverses these inequities through some combination of new norms, policies and/or representation.

Structural racism: Structural racism is the totality of ways in which societies foster racial discrimination, through mutually reinforcing inequitable systems (in housing, education, employment, earnings, benefits, credit, media, health care, criminal justice, and so on) that in turn reinforce discriminatory beliefs, values, and distribution of resources, which together affect the risk of adverse health outcomes.  Structural racism involves interconnected institutions, whose linkages are historically rooted and culturally reinforced.