The United States is recognized as leading the industrialized world in violent death rates. The increase in youth violence is primarily attributable to an increase in the "lethality" and not the "frequency" of violent acts because more crimes are being committed with handguns. This chapter reviews the existing literature on violence prevention programs for children and youth. Highlighted are issues of clinical significance, outcome specificity, moderator effects, and evaluation concerns, followed by a more in-depth discussion of these issues as they relate to future directions. Following this programmatic review, the chapter addresses the strengths and limitations of a risk-focused approach to violence prevention. An alternative model is proposed that builds on the contributions of the risk-focused framework, but goes beyond its limitations. This model emphasizes life course development and situates violence in a broader, dynamic framework of human development. The chapter suggests that by casting violence as a negative developmental outcome, prevention efforts can be geared toward promoting healthy human development via direct services to individuals as well as by reforming the systems and settings in which development unfolds. Finally, the chapter presents a review and critique of the violence prevention goals of the Healthy People 2000 initiative as they relate to the empirical and theoretical perspectives presented, and makes recommendations for linking goals and strategies within a broader developmental model. (Contains 1 note and 52 references.) (SD)