UB researchers share insights on social work's response to gun violence
By Tiffany J. Nhan
Published October 24, 2024
Three faculty members and a recent graduate from the University at Buffalo School of Social Work contributed their insights to a special edition of Advances in Social Work, which was published over the summer and highlights social work’s response to the gun violence epidemic.
Media coverage of gun violence is often limited to mass shootings and overlooks firearm-related suicides and community firearm violence. The featured articles by UB School of Social Work researchers focus on community mental health and use community and systemic frameworks to identify and advocate for culturally informed interventions.
The issue is available to all through open access.
Improving the Social Work Response to the Gun Violence Epidemic
In the issue’s opening editorial, Patricia Logan-Greene, PhD, associate professor and associate dean for academic affairs, highlights social workers’ strengths in addressing firearm violence due to the field’s use of a bio-psycho-social-spiritual framework and the historical positioning of trauma-informed care and social justice. In addition, she explains how social work researchers can contribute to ending firearm violence by studying how firearm violence is experienced and influenced by institutions and communities.
Logan-Greene — who serves as co-lead for the national Grand Challenge for Social Work to Prevent Gun Violence — co-authored the editorial with Peter Simonsson, PhD, assistant professor at Temple University, and Karen Slovak, PhD, DSW core faculty at Capella University.
Deaths of Despair in Black and White: Gun Violence, Political Economy and the Case for Macro Intervention
Christopher St. Vil, PhD, associate professor, co-authored a paper that connects gun deaths to political and economic transformations among the white working class — such as “the loss of well-paid, meaningful, unionized work [and] the decimation of local industries” — and in Black urban communities, where “gun violence emerged from more mundane social dynamics within the context of widespread joblessness and strained police-community relations.” The paper argues that increased levels of gun homicide and gun suicide among younger Black men and middle-aged white men, respectively, stem from a political economy that produces despair among vulnerable segments of the laboring classes.
St. Vil’s co-authors were Roberto R. Aspholm, PhD, associate professor of social work at University of St. Thomas, and Nathan Aguilar, PhD candidate at Columbia University.
This article argues that elevated levels of gun homicide and gun suicide among younger Black men and middle-aged white men, respectively, are the consequences of a political economy that produces widespread despair among the most vulnerable segments of the laboring classes. Understood in this way, these phenomena share a common etiology whose roots can be traced to two major, temporally distinct developments: (1) postwar shifts in the political economy that redefined central cities as sites of Black dislocation, and (2) the more recent intensification of globalization and investor class power that has redefined smaller cities, towns and rural communities as sites of white dislocation. These transformations have rendered working-class Blacks and whites (and others) vulnerable to a wide range of maladies and adverse social outcomes, including involvement in gun violence.
In addition to examining these political-economic transformations and their effects on Black and white working-class communities, this article also explores the divergent racialized manifestations of gun violence within these demographic groups. While micro and mezzo interventions are typically stressed to respond to these issues, their ultimate resolution requires recognition of their common roots in conditions of structurally imposed despair and the concomitant remedy of those conditions at the macro level.
Mental Health Service Use Among Middle Eastern Migrant Women: Social Work’s Role in Promoting Mental Health Literacy
Krisztina Baltimore, PhD ’23, MSW ’18, research associate at Boston Medical Center, and Wooksoo Kim, PhD, professor and director of the school’s Immigrant and Refugee Research Institute, co-authored a paper that explores cultural and structural barriers to mental health service use among Middle Eastern migrant women.
In addition, the co-authors advocate for increasing mental health literacy as an intervention to increase service engagement.
Migrants who relocate to the United States from the Middle East are more likely to face a host of structural and individual barriers that can significantly contribute to their mental health issues and affect their psychological well-being. Addressing mental health problems and incentivizing help-seeking behavior is important among women who are more likely to face daily stressors in child care, household responsibilities and marital relationships. In this paper, we discuss factors that impact help-seeking for mental health problems among Middle Eastern migrant women, including English language proficiency, structural challenges and cultural factors, such as shame and stigma. We argue that when considering its potential effectiveness, targeting mental health literacy may serve as the best direction for future research and social work intervention in order to enhance help-seeking behavior among this population. Recommendations for social workers include using community-based partnerships to provide educational resources regarding mental health services through health care centers, social service agencies and local Muslim and Arab organizations.
This research contributes to one of the Grand Challenges for Social Work tackling our nation's toughest social problems: Prevent gun violence.