Terrorist attacks profoundly impact the lives of survivors, their families, and their communities. Dr. Joe Duffy’s research shows that listening to trauma survivors has an important part to play in social work education.
Duffy and his colleagues created an innovative curriculum based on a model they later termed “compassionate inquiry.” While Duffy was a faculty member at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland, he helped develop an approach to social work education that addressed the experiences of people living with long-term trauma, particularly people affected by the 30-year period of conflict in Northern Ireland known as “The Troubles.”
A Fulbright award provided Duffy with the opportunity to evaluate how his pedagogic approach could assist social work students in the United States. Duffy came to New York in 2018 as a Fulbright Scholar from Northern Ireland with a proposal to “bring the voices of survivors from 9/11 to the heart of social work classroom education.”
In New York, Duffy collaborated with Professor Carol Tosone, whose research focused on the effects of September 11. Together, they worked with members of the World Trade Center Survivors’ Network and others to develop a project within a Master’s-level trauma course. Applying the pedagogical methods he developed in Belfast, Duffy invited survivors to share their experiences directly with graduate students.
Duffy carefully worked closely with the September 11 Survivors to select interview questions, helping them feel protected and safe while engaging with the students and sharing their narratives. Over three weeks, first responders and people who had worked in the World Trade Center described how the attacks and their aftermath reshaped their lives, identities, and relationships. Survivors shared examples of how their familial and personal relationships changed, how they dealt with mental health challenges such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and how they considered their life choices differently after September 11.
Importantly, the survivors also shared that hope can sometimes coexist alongside trauma.
The survivors identified active listening as the most important of many crucial skills that social workers need when supporting people affected by trauma. In their research, Duffy and his colleagues describe the importance of active listening skills in combination with building trust and cooperation as ‘compassionate witnessing’ which entails removing assumptions about people’s experiences and circumstances to listen without judgment. According to Duffy, with the right interventions and support, people “can learn to live more restoratively with their trauma histories.”
Students called this experience “much more powerful” than learning from a book or lecture. One student said it was “one of the most powerful learning opportunities they had encountered,” and another said it had “dramatically changed their perspective on trauma.”
Students observed that working with survivors demonstrated “the complexity of how trauma is experienced and processed by each person” and that revealed that survivors do not simply “work through” trauma and return to their former lives; rather, their lives may be divided into “before and after.” Students also witnessed how survivors’ experiences of September 11 memories were “frozen in time, as though these were ‘yesterday.’”
Near the end of Duffy’s Fulbright, one survivor wrote to him to say that they felt ready to return to the World Trade Center site for the annual September 11 commemoration for the first time in the two decades since the attacks. Duffy describes receiving this message as one of the most memorable and enduring moments of his academic career.
Duffy and his colleagues published their research in international journal Social Work Education in an article titled “Teaching the Art of Compassionate Inquiry: Involving Survivors from 9/11 in Social Work Education.” This article summarizes their research saying, “we should not underestimate the healing power of a warm, nurturing presence and the role of the empathic witness as a beacon of hope in the desolate experience of trauma.”
Since his Fulbright, Duffy was invited by the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE), the U.S. accrediting body for social work education, to lead the development of a national Curricular Guide on Service User Involvement in Social Work Education. The guide will be a tool for over 900 accredited social work institutions to use in training social workers. It will also launch at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum in November 2026 where it will in the future be included as a staff library resource for social work education.