Session: Community Gun Violence Interventions and the Reproduction of Inequality (Society for Social Work and Research 31st Annual Conference)

Background and Purpose: In fall 2023, the Grand Challenges for Social Work identified the prevention of gun violence as its newest challenge to the profession, a long-overdue acknowledgement of one of the most persistent and pressing issues confronting U.S. communities. This is particularly true of our nation’s most marginalized urban communities where gun violence and homicide rates comparably rank among the world’s highest. By focusing on Black and Latinx communities disproportionately affected by gun violence, this symposium explores survivors’ experiences and critiques current institutional responses and violence prevention strategies, emphasizing the need for more effective, equitable approaches that consider the broader social and economic conditions contributing to gun violence.

Methods: The papers comprising this panel emerge from three distinct studies. Two of these are qualitative studies that explore the experiences of Black and Latinx gun violence survivors and their families and how legal institutions, namely the police and immigration enforcement, respond to their harm and complicate the process of help-seeking and recovery. Both studies employed semi-structured interviews and inductive analyses to examine how survivors and their co-victims make sense of their experiences. The third paper is a content analysis of several books that both reflect the ostensible state of the evidence in community gun violence prevention and have helped to define the parameters of research and practice in this area in distinct, overlapping ways.

Results: Data analysis from all three studies indicates that dominant responses to community gun violence tend to reproduce dynamics of victimization, disaffection, and dispossession among individuals and communities most impacted by gun violence. The two qualitative studies emphasize how responses from police and victim-advocacy units are shaped by racist presumptions that often criminalize victims, disregard family survivors, and fail to provide a coherent and responsive continuum of services. For many Latinx families, these dynamics are exacerbated by the prevailing “crimmigration” regime, whereby immigration status functions as a marker that places those without documents in danger of detainment and deportation. The content analysis study similarly identifies that prevailing "evidence-based" approaches to community gun violence prevention recognize dispossession as a fundamental cause of violence. However, these approaches contend that violence prevention is the primary means to address poverty, rather than viewing poverty alleviation as essential to preventing violence. This conventional perspective inadvertently limits the scope of potential interventions by disconnecting violence prevention efforts from the underlying conditions that perpetuate violence.

Conclusions and Implications: These studies offer valuable insights into enhancing responses to community gun violence at two distinct levels. Firstly, they elucidate the deficiencies in current policies and practices of law enforcement and associated institutions in addressing the needs of gun violence survivors and their families, offering recommendations for improving institutional responses. Secondly, these studies collectively challenge several central assumptions embedded in violence prevention practice and call to broaden the scope of intervention. They similarly challenge researchers to critically question the assumptions and ideologies embedded in prevailing responses to community gun violence, with the aim of fostering more rigorous inquiry for the benefit of the common good.