Eats me alive!: social workers reflect on practice in neoliberal contexts

ABSTRACT

Social workers regularly engage with people who have experienced traumatic events—such as domestic violence, sexual assault, human trafficking, persecution, or armed conflict—but our understanding of how this work affects social workers themselves is still developing. Theories of burnout, vicarious trauma, and secondary traumatic stress illuminate the difficulty of trauma work, yet these approaches generally assign accountability for self-care to individual social workers, neglecting the contexts in which they operate—a response that reflects the neoliberal ideology of personal responsibility. In this article, we argue social workers charged with supporting those who experience trauma are themselves jeopardized by the organizational manifestations of neoliberalism. This article presents the reflections of social workers doing difficult work in neoliberal contexts. In-depth interviews were conducted with seven American social workers serving trauma-affected clients in non-clinical roles to better understand how they experienced their work. In their responses, participants underscored the centrality of organizational and systemic contexts. As one of our participants commented, 'The organizational stuff eats me alive!’ It calls on social work educators to prepare students to recognize, critically engage, and resist neoliberal elements of their practice contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Neoliberal social work
• trauma social work
• boundaries
• self-care
• personal responsibility

Acknowledgments

We are deeply grateful to the participants who shared their time, experiences, and insight in the name of lightening the load for others.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elizabeth Hendrix

Elizabeth Hendrix, MSW, has direct practice experience with poor and marginalized communities internationally, as well as refugees and survivors of human trafficking in the United States. Her research interests center around the experiences of helping professionals themselves as they engage with trauma-affected populations, as well as the nature, rigor, and content of social work education.

Amanda Barusch

Amanda Barusch, MSW, PhD, is best known for her narrative inquiries into the experiences of older adults and her research and advocacy on social policy. She lectures on age-affirmative practice at the University of Otago (New Zealand) and teaches scholarly writing at the University of Utah (USA). Her academic articles have appeared in leading social work and gerontology journals and she has authored seven books.

Christina Gringeri

Christina Gringeri, MSW, PhD is Professor and Director of Doctoral Studies at the College of Social Work, University of Utah. Her research has largely focused on women and work, especially in lower income households. In recent years she has contributed to research examining feminisms in social work research, rigor and quality in qualitative research, trauma in the life narratives of low income women, and building bridges between classroom and field education in the areas of policy and diversity.