Chapter 14
Integrative Approaches to Addressing Community Gun Violence:
A Multi-Disciplinary Framework for Reducing Incidence, Prevalence, and Impact
Chapter Overview
This paper examines the pervasive issue of community violence in the United States, with a particular emphasis on gun violence and its devastating impact on youth and communities. Despite the abundance of alarming statistics, traditional approaches have fallen short in driving policy or cultural change, largely neglecting the underlying systemic contributors to violence. The article proposes a holistic framework that integrates social work, public health, and crisis/emergency management to address both immediate needs and long-term resilience. By focusing on psycho-socio impacts—encompassing the psychological and social consequences for individuals, families, and organizations—the paper advocates for evidence-based interventions at strategic “touchpoints” to disrupt cycles of violence. It highlights the Emergency Management Cycle by FEMA as a guiding paradigm for collaborative action among social workers, health practitioners, law enforcement, educators, and community members. Through this interdisciplinary approach, the paper aims to foster sustainable solutions that not only respond to acute crises but also strengthen community structures to prevent future violence. The recommendations emphasize the unique capacities of social work and other mental health professionals in leading and implementing integrated strategies that promote safety, well-being, and healing in communities affected by gun violence.
Video
Join Dr. Richard L. Glover, author of Chapter 14, as he discusses his professional background and the chapter’s exploration of multidisciplinary strategies to reduce gun violence, its prevalence, and its profound impact on individuals and communities.
Reflective Questions
Designed to encourage critical thinking, real-world application, and meaningful discussion.
- How does a public health framework shift our understanding of gun violence?
- What distinguishes community gun violence from isolated traumatic events?
- How do structural inequities shape both exposure to violence and resource allocation?
Resource Connect
Links to professional standards, policy frameworks, and cross-referenced chapters that support deeper exploration.content.
CDC Community Violence Prevention Resources for Action
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Community Violence Prevention Resources for Action organize evidence-supported prevention approaches across individual, family, school, neighborhood, and societal levels. Strategies include strengthening youth skills and relationships, connecting young people with supportive adults, improving community environments, and intervening to reduce harm and prevent future violence. Instructors can use the framework to help students distinguish primary prevention from interventions directed toward people or places at greatest immediate risk.
Community Violence Intervention Implementation Checklist
The Office of Justice Programs’ Community Violence Intervention Implementation Checklist provides a step-by-step framework for planning and evaluating community violence intervention initiatives. It addresses community engagement, local violence assessment, cross-sector collaboration, program selection, workforce preparation, measurement, sustainability, and continuous improvement. Students can apply the checklist to the chapter’s case exercise by identifying the partners, information, services, and accountability structures required for a neighborhood-level response.
Health Alliance for Violence Intervention: HVIP Standards and Resources
The Health Alliance for Violence Intervention provides standards and indicators for hospital-based violence intervention programs, along with implementation guides, sample materials, training resources, and program-development tools. Hospital-based violence intervention programs connect survivors of violent injury with violence intervention specialists who provide safety planning, emotional support, case management, and connections to community services after discharge. The materials can be used to examine how hospitals, mental-health professionals, social-service agencies, and community organizations can coordinate responses to violent injury.
Group Violence Intervention Implementation Guide
The National Network for Safe Communities’ Group Violence Intervention Implementation Guide describes a focused strategy that brings together community members, social-service providers, and law-enforcement partners to address recurring group-related violence. The guide includes planning tools, problem analysis, partnership development, communication strategies, service coordination, implementation monitoring, and sustainability guidance. Instructors can use it to compare the roles of community authority, supportive services, and legal sanctions and to examine ethical concerns involving surveillance, coercion, trust, and racial equity.
Cross-reference: See Chapter 13 The Media and Mental Health Stigma for analysis of how highly publicized violence shapes fear, stigma, and public policy; Chapter 12 Structural Racism and Community Mental Health for examination of neighborhood disinvestment, racialized exposure to violence, unequal resource allocation, and institutional mistrust; and Chapter 15 Collective Trauma and Collective Loss for discussion of shared grief, chronic threat, disruption of community life, and long-term collective recovery.
Further Resources
Suggested readings, research areas, and materials for extended learning.
Community Violence Exposure and Mental Health
Miliauskas, C. R., Faus, D. P., da Cruz, V. L., Vallaperde, J. G. R. N., Junger, W., & Lopes, C. S. (2022). Community violence and internalizing mental health symptoms in adolescents: A systematic review. BMC Psychiatry, 22, Article 253.
This systematic review found a consistent association between greater exposure to community violence and internalizing symptoms among adolescents, including anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress. Direct victimization was generally associated with greater harm than witnessing violence. The review can help students consider differences in exposure, proximity, developmental stage, family support, and access to protective resources.
Darawshy, N. A.-S., Gewirtz, A., & Marsalis, S. (2020). Psychological intervention and prevention programs for child and adolescent exposure to community violence: A systematic review. Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, 23(3), 365–378.
This review examines intervention and prevention programs for children and adolescents exposed to community violence. School-based interventions showed some benefits for posttraumatic stress and internalizing symptoms, but the authors identified a limited evidence base and a need for more rigorous research. The review supports integrating mental-health treatment with prevention, family support, school partnerships, and improvements in community conditions.
Community violence should not be treated only as a series of isolated traumatic events. Assessment and intervention should also consider repeated exposure, grief, fear of future violence, family disruption, school attendance, housing conditions, institutional trust, and the cumulative effects of living under chronic threat.
Community Violence Intervention and Street Outreach
Ross, M. C., Ochoa, E. M., & Papachristos, A. V. (2023). Evaluating the impact of a street outreach intervention on participant involvement in gun violence. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(46), e2300327120.
This quasi-experimental study evaluates Chicago CRED, a street-outreach program combining sustained engagement, coaching, employment assistance, and other services for people at elevated risk of gun-violence involvement. Participants who completed the program experienced substantially fewer subsequent violent-crime arrests than matched comparison participants. The findings also illustrate the difficulty of evaluating programs in which enrollment, participation, service dosage, and completion vary considerably.
Corburn, J., & colleagues. (2025). Community violence intervention: Measuring risk and protective factors for gun use among program participants. Health & Justice.
This review examines how community violence intervention evaluations define and measure participants’ risks, needs, and protective factors. It identifies variation in what programs measure and argues for stronger attention to trauma, prior violence exposure, social supports, service needs, and protective resources. Instructors can use the article to help students develop evaluation measures that go beyond arrests and shootings alone.
Violence-interruption programs should not be presented as a single standardized intervention. Programs vary in outreach methods, staffing, participant selection, service intensity, relationships with law enforcement, community leadership, and available social supports. Evaluation should examine implementation quality, participant experience, worker safety, trust, service access, and community-level outcomes as well as changes in violence.
Hospital-Based and Place-Based Prevention
Jang, A., Thomas, A., Slocum, J., et al. (2023). The gap between hospital-based violence intervention services and client needs: A systematic review. Surgery, 174(4), 1008–1020.
This review examines whether hospital-based violence intervention programs address the needs identified by survivors of intentional violence. Common needs included mental-health care, employment, education, safety, and other social supports. The review is useful for evaluating whether a program merely makes referrals or provides sustained assistance that clients can realistically access.
Moyer, R., MacDonald, J. M., Ridgeway, G., & Branas, C. C. (2019). Effect of remediating blighted vacant land on shootings: A citywide cluster randomized trial. American Journal of Public Health, 109(1), 140–144.
This randomized study found that cleaning and improving vacant urban land was associated with reductions in nearby shootings, without evidence that shootings were simply displaced to adjacent areas. The study demonstrates how community violence prevention can include changes to the physical environment rather than focusing exclusively on changing the behavior of individuals considered at risk.
An integrative strategy may combine trauma treatment, hospital-based intervention, street outreach, youth development, employment and educational support, environmental improvement, community organizing, and carefully evaluated public-safety measures. No single program should be expected to resolve the economic, institutional, and neighborhood conditions that sustain community violence.