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Vicki Santos: A self-described science nerd in college, Patricia Logan-Greene had no inkling that social work was her calling until she volunteered at a rape and sexual abuse crisis center, which she did to boost her medical school application, and realized that this was the kind of work that she loved.

Patricia Logan-Greene: And it took a little while, but eventually I realized, wait a minute, people do that for a living.

Vicki Santos: Now an associate professor at the University at Buffalo's School of Social Work, Logan-Greene is an expert on violence and victimization. A few years ago, she turned her focus to gun violence and found out there was minimal guidance for most practitioners within the field. A surprising discovery, since no one works more closely with people at risk of gun violence than social workers. She needed to do something about it and today is co-leading the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare's Grand Challenge to Prevent Gun Violence. The team's work is just beginning, but Logan-Greene is confident that once social workers are fully mobilized to address this national crisis, they will make a significant impact.

Welcome to Driven to Discover, the University at Buffalo podcast that explores what inspires today's innovators. My name is Vicki Santos, and on this episode I'll be talking to Dr. Logan-Greene about why social workers are uniquely positioned to prevent gun violence, and how they aim to do it.

So Dr. Logan-Greene, you studied biology in college and you ended up as a social work researcher.

Patricia Logan-Greene: Yeah, I don't think anyone was more surprised than me by the twists and turns my journey took. I loved taking science classes in college. When I got a job working in research laboratories at Vanderbilt University after college, I discovered that the doing of research and the reading of all the cool discoveries that were made from the research are very different. So it took several years of me working in these labs, studying HIV. I did a stint for a number of years basically growing mosquitoes as part of a malaria lab. And during that time I considered a lot of different potential careers.

Somewhere in there I was considering medical school, and I knew that for a medical school application I needed to have some good volunteer experience. So I was living in Nashville and I took up the Nashville scene, and there were two sort of social service-y volunteer positions that I applied for. One was in a homeless shelter and one was in something called the Rape and Sexual Abuse Center of Nashville. And I responded to both of those.

The homeless center was interesting, I enjoyed it, but I loved working at RASAC, as it's called. And there I was trained to do things like hospital accompaniment for forensic sexual assault exams. I spent many, many, many hours on a hotline for people who had survived sexual assault or sexual abuse. And I just found that population so inspiring. Their stories were truly horrific. The amount of things that a human can experience and come out the other side, in some cases strengthened and empowered by their experiences. And it took a little while but eventually I realized, wait a minute, people do that for a living, and boy, that would be really fun.

And I found a local social work program, a master's in social work program. And in my memory it was like two weeks later after finding it, I had been accepted. And I'm sure it wasn't actually that fast, but compared to the grueling process of trying to feel like, figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up, it happened very quickly.

Vicki Santos: And so how did you take that experience and take it to social work research, which is what you're doing now?

Patricia Logan-Greene: I think researchers are just going to research, you know. I'd always had a brain for research, and I was going through the classes and it was still in the MSW program that I figured, gosh, what I really want to do is a PhD, and I really want to contribute to the knowledge development and keep working on improving practices from that particular level. So I applied to PhD programs when I was still an MSW student and then I went straight through.

Vicki Santos: Your interest in social work stemmed from working with victims, but you're a little unusual in the field in that much of your research focuses on the perpetrators of violence. Can you talk a little bit about what compels you to focus on that side of the equation?

Patricia Logan-Greene: In my first semester as a PhD student, I was assigned to write a paper that did a policy analysis of something that was relevant for us in our area of focus. And I chose to write a policy analysis of the Jacob Wetterling Act, which is the first act that established the sex offender registry. And that whole process was fascinating to me because it wasn't based on empirical evidence; it was more based on the desire to appease people to do something. When it was initially established, it was never meant to be public. And there have been a lot of problems that are beyond the scope of this conversation that have come out of having these public registries, including some vigilantism and some other scary stuff, in addition to the fact that it sort of misdirects people on understanding how child abuse happens. So that was sort of what caused me to think, gosh, we really do need to focus on those who perpetrate violence. If we want to stop victimization, we cannot spend our lives looking downstream at the victims. We have to figure out upstream what's going on to cause the violence in the first place.

Vicki Santos: So how did you become interested in gun violence specifically?

Patricia Logan-Greene: Yeah, that was another unexpected twist for me. So several years back now, I was preparing to teach a course on interpersonal violence and, being a citizen of the United States, I was aware that we had a lot of firearm violence compared to our peers. But I went looking for readings for my master's in social work students on, basically, “Guns 101” for social workers—what you need to know about firearm violence in your practice, whatever kind of practice context you work in, so that you can help to prevent gun violence. And that was when I found just nothing. And I want to be really fair here because there have been a lot of social work researchers in specific subfields that have been doing a lot for a long time, but it wasn't getting elevated and it wasn't getting disseminated to general social work practitioners seemingly at all.

And part of that is the federal prohibitions that had come out both about funding research, but also about federal guidance for things like what the CDC could say about how to prevent suicide. There were decades when they couldn't mention firearms in any of their suicide prevention materials because they were prohibited from, you know, saying anything that might be perceived as gun control.

And what I'm talking about, to be clear, has very little to do with gun control. I'm talking about, for example, asking a family in crisis, do you have guns in the home? And maybe we should think about not having guns in the home, or at least ensuring that the person who is in crisis doesn't have immediate access to those guns. Those are the sorts of things that I thought would be happening and that that guidance would exist. And I was really shocked to discover that it didn't.

I was also embarking on a steep learning curve for myself of understanding how to talk about firearms in ways that are acceptable to a wide variety of people. If, for example, social workers just came out and told all of their clients, you shouldn't own guns, they're dangerous. That's not going to do anything at all to help any problems. And it would be anti-constitutional as well.

Vicki Santos: And how would you describe the overall picture of how gun violence is impacting American lives?

Patricia Logan-Greene: I think there's a lot of misperceptions about this. We are recording this the day after we had another horrific mass shooting in the United States. And I could say that statement right now, and it would be true of a lot of days in 2024 or any of the recent years that we've had. And those are the sorts of incidents that get tons and tons of coverage. But mass shootings are a tiny fraction of the gun violence that we have in our country. And most of the gun violence never makes headlines at all. It's occurring in people's homes, in disadvantaged and already marginalized communities where in some places I've heard it said that it's like there's a mass shooting every day.

The other problem with our popular discourse is that we tend to only focus on fatalities. And that is a pretty small piece of the overall impact of firearm violence in our country. So it's about, depending on the year, somewhere around 40 to 50,000 people who are killed. About double that from the best estimates, again depending on the year, survive their gunshots. And sometimes those are minor injuries. Other times, they're lifelong disabilities. Beyond that, every person who was shot, whether they lived or died, is embedded in a family, in a neighborhood, in a community. They have children in their lives. They have mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers. Every time somebody is shot and survives or experiences a serious injury, that reverberates through the entire community.

We need to talk about the fact that when we have as much of a firearm violence problem as we do, and I'm including suicide, I think the impact of surviving suicide of somebody that you love is a tremendous trauma. That means that multiple, if not dozens of people, are affected by that trauma and that loss. And we have not even begun to address the mental health impacts of that.

And I want to be really clear, because I think there's this perception that mental health contributes to gun violence. And I think that partly stems from the fact that we only talk about these mass shootings. There's a little bit more of a link between somebody who perpetuates a mass shooting, but the vast majority of gun violence is not linked to mental health. In fact, the linkage between gun violence and mental health goes the other direction. If you've experienced gun violence, maybe as a child you witnessed it or your uncle was shot or all these other ways that you can be connected to gun violence, that's where the mental health piece is. And we are just letting that happen and doing very little to address it.

Vicki Santos: Can you explain what makes social workers the most suited to prevent gun violence? And what issues have made it difficult for social workers to address this crisis until now?

Patricia Logan-Greene: Well, I certainly think the lack of attention to it both in curricula and from federal guidance and our accrediting and governing bodies of the discipline of social work was contributing to that. I also … social work is a diverse profession, but I think as a whole social workers tend to gravitate to the places that they're comfortable with. And I think more social workers are uncomfortable with guns. They're scared of the technical aspects, you know, they're scared of using terms incorrectly. So I think they tend to shy away from it.

I also don't think they've necessarily seen it as their role. To be fair, also, many social workers already are holding a lot of responsibilities, and adding more things to social workers plates, especially when they're perhaps in understaffed, under-resourced agencies already, is an ask. I recognize that. But I also think that we could accomplish a lot with a little in this regard. Giving social workers a few more tools, prodding them to make sure that whenever they're doing assessments, they're asking about firearms. And also leveraging the fact that in many cases, social workers have ongoing trusting relationships with their clients.

So some of this work that I'm doing is mirroring that of physicians. They've been really trying to address this issue for a while, and I'm following their lead in a lot of this. And of course, there's a lot of different kinds of doctors, a lot of different kinds of social workers. I do think we may, in general, in many cases, have a different, more ongoing conversation with our clients than doctors have with their patients. So I think it makes it a little bit easier for us to leverage those relationships and our rapport, and the fact that we're already trained to address thorny issues in a way that puts aside our own biases and tries to meet the client where they are.

And, I'll be honest, I know what I'm doing here isn't going to solve the problem of firearm violence. There's no question about that. And there probably is no single solution to firearm violence anyway. But I feel like if what I'm saying here, or the work that I'm doing, causes one social worker to recognize that their client maybe shouldn't have access to a gun, and that I've equipped that social worker to give the tools to say, you're in crisis, let's just put these firearms in a safe place for now where you don't have access to them, and one life has been saved—I will feel like I've accomplished something.

Vicki Santos: So you are now co-leading the Grand Challenge to Prevent Gun Violence along with colleagues from NYU and the University of Chicago. What does that mean? What is the work to be done and where are you in that process?

Patricia Logan-Greene: This is the very beginning of that process for us. So the Grand Challenges in Social Work, everybody should go Google that because it's a really great set of initiatives, are meant to identify and synergize efforts to tackle society's biggest challenges. The Prevent Gun Violence is one that I've been advocating for a while, I'm not the only one, and I'm so excited that we can now use that spotlight and that infrastructure and the networking capabilities of these Grand Challenges to get a lot more done.

So at the time of recording, we are still organizing our networks. We're still trying to figure out what makes sense in terms of how we can best come together and really accomplish something around this. You know, how can we make sure that researchers are talking to practitioners, and vice versa. And how can we bring together these disparate and sometimes siloed researchers in different sort of topics of violence and start to really accomplish something and start to move the needle.

And I will say this: It is one of the most exciting things I've ever done in my life. It's also very intimidating. Some of the other Grand Challenges have been incredible in terms of what they've done when they bring disparate groups of people together who have all been working in silos. I think that's the real power of networking people who are passionate and knowledgeable and fiercely working to prevent or ameliorate societal problems. So it's still early days and I am very excited to see what's going to come out of this challenge as we develop it.

Vicki Santos: In addition to co-leading the Grand Challenge, what's on the horizon for you and your research?

Patricia Logan-Greene: Well certainly the activities that I'm already engaged in are keeping me plenty busy, but I've also been motivated to get a little bit more into targeted violence, by which I mean things like racially motivated violence—like what happened in 2022 at the Tops grocery store—the other kinds of domestic terrorism and violent extremism that we're seeing a lot of these days. And I think similar to some of the arguments that I've been making about how social workers are well poised to address gun violence, I don't think social workers know that they have a role to play in identifying those who might perpetrate violent extremism as well. And that is unfortunately a growing problem, and I am excited about some new, very early stage projects around that.

Vicki Santos: Well thank you so much for coming by and spending time with us and sharing your insights. We really appreciate it and we wish you good luck.

Patricia Logan-Greene: Thank you, and thank you for having me.