Why is not long-term prevention prioritized?

Year after year, evidence-based research shows that long-term investments in violence prevention lead to less violence in society and a healthier population over time. So why are we in Sweden seeing increasingly punitive measures that call for tougher approaches and longer sentences, instead of focusing on long-term prevention? We asked Ingvar Nilsson, one of the keynote speakers at this year’s violence prevention conference organized by MÄN on November 14.

Ingvar Nilsson highlights five main reasons why preventive efforts fall short:

1. Lack of Insight

Many decision-makers don’t understand the connection between an acting-out little boy in preschool and a gang-involved 20-year-old two decades later. There is a fundamental lack of insight—they fail to see causal relationships over time. This often results in one-off interventions and project-funded initiatives that either end after a year or get deprioritized when a new political term begins.

2. The Wrong Actor Bears the Cost

The entity responsible for the upfront investment—such as a preschool director or school principal—is rarely the one who reaps the benefits later on. More often, it’s entirely different actors, like the police or social services, who benefit in the long run. The one who invests doesn’t get the returns, and the one who gets the returns cannot invest preventively.

3. The time problem

There is a long time span between a preventive intervention and visible results. The system is governed by annual budgets and, at best, political terms. This means long-term investments are not viewed as advantageous because they don’t yield returns until far later. We need to rethink violence prevention and recognize that it requires investments over decades. Long-term commitment is essential.

4. Certain costs – uncertain revenue

The cost of a preventive measure is always certain, while the payoff is uncertain. We live in a time when end results are expected to be guaranteed even before a project begins, making it difficult to estimate the long-term economic benefits for society. This makes decisions politically and economically risky.

5. Economic prioritization

The money has to come from somewhere. Prevention costs money, and giving up investments that produce quick results in favor of something that may only have an impact much later is rarely popular—among either policymakers or the public.

Ingvar Nilsson also emphasizes the importance of viewing long-term investments in prevention not as a “soft issue,” but as a critical economic necessity.

Want to hear more from Ingvar Nilsson and learn how violence prevention pays off from a socioeconomic perspective? Watch our recording of MÄN's conference on violence prevention below, held November 14 2025, where Ingvar Nilsson was one of the speakers (in Swedish).