Vicarious trauma - ‘I’m not as tough as I think I am’

Trigger warning: deals with issues of rape, sexual assault, child murder and violence against social workers

I don’t think it was misplaced bravado when I used to say things didn’t get to me. I’ve worked some tough areas in dysfunctional authorities witnessing, along with colleagues, some horrific abuse. 

I now realise I just didn’t understand my feelings that well. 

It doesn’t appear there’s an agreed terminology for the damage felt by professionals empathising with those they are trying to help. It is variously referred to as vicarious trauma, secondary trauma, compassion fatigue and burnout. 

There aren’t many professions where workers are expected to experience physical violence or verbal abuse and continue to empathise with the service user. Overall, the key concept is that by working with people who’ve experienced trauma and in trying to help them, professionals take on part of their client’s emotional trauma for themselves. 

This can manifest itself in various ways. I’ve been criticised for having too much empathy for parents. My argument has always been that those growing up in care have often had horrific childhoods, sometimes worse than the situation they were removed from. Starting my career in residential in the early 90s, I know just how bad some of these places were.

In a home I worked in a member of staff, John*, who’d himself been in care, tried to stop a young person smashing his fists through windows while heavily intoxicated. John ran outside trying to wrap his arms around him protectively. The lad’s mates used this an opportunity to batter John. They smashed him against a fence, bludgeoning him over the head with a bottle and jabbed him in the side with a knife, raining down kicks and blows. 

Frantically, the assistant manager rang 999. The police response was that they were sick of coming out to our place. By the time they turned up an hour later my colleague had been carted off in an ambulance with a gashed head and fractured ribs. I felt particularly guilty as he had generously swapped shifts with me so I could go on holiday.

Needless to say, John was never the same again. He returned to work psychologically scarred. It didn’t help that the local gang would regularly bang on the doors and taunt him: “Do you remember your head banging against that fence… you can do fuck all, there’s no witnesses.”

Not surprisingly the home’s atmosphere was never quite the same, although the lad remained with us. On no occasion did I see a member of staff criticise or chastise him for the incident.

There was clearly an impact on staff morale, with a blend of direct and vicarious trauma. Direct, in the sense that we all felt vulnerable – the local police were hardly chomping at the bit to come to our aid. Vicarious, in that we continued to empathise with a troubled young man who showed no remorse whatsoever for the fact that John had only been trying to stop him hurting himself. 

Professionals who work with offenders and perpetrators can experience vicarious trauma because they have to suppress their personal views and emotions of often deviant, abusive behaviour. This situation represented a toxic blend of a victim who was a close friend to everyone alongside a troubled lad who they were caring for. Typically, there was no de-brief or support for anyone – we were just expected to get on with it as it “came with the territory”. 

We know assaults on colleagues can affect whole teams because of their exposure to similar situations and the fear that they could be subject to a similar attack. Yet I continued to feel empathy for the young man, which possibly isn’t a natural response, combined with my guilt about the shift swap.

Fast forward 15 years. Colleagues had crowded into my office. An 11-year-old girl in our care had been repeatedly sexually abused by her male foster carer over a three-year period. Sickeningly, this went as far as attempted rape. 

The abuser claimed he was trying to teach her about sex so she would not get pregnant like other young girls in the area. She only disclosed through concern that it would happen to another fostered child. Such an immense sense of responsibility for one so vulnerable and young. 

The ‘carer’ had been fostering for over 15 years. He kept large bundles of porn hidden in a coffee table where professionals had innocently perched their mugs of tea. We speculated that he must have got a real kick out of it being there in plain sight. 

As professionals we were all a bit long in the tooth even back then. The girl’s independent reviewing officer began to sob. “That fucking bastard,” she said. I’m not suggesting the rest of us weren’t horrified by what had happened, however we appeared to be sitting there with an air of distancing, numbing detachment, a classic response to vicarious trauma. 

Surely a more natural reaction would have been to rage, shout, sob and swear. We didn’t, our distraught colleague almost seemed like the odd one out. The authority’s typically feeble response to press outrage was the stock 'lessons have been learnt'. 

Around a similar time, a baby was severely shaken by his father. The allocated social worker was still a trainee. She vividly described to me the events of the night before, having been out until the early hours. The family lived on an estate known as a place of last resort for desperate families. Clearly stunned and still shocked, she told me the police had turned up in numbers with riot vans and dogs.

Not surprisingly, she was traumatised. The father threatened to firebomb the offices with me and the trainee in it. A council rent collector had previously been murdered on the estate so there was a tokenistic risk assessment from our employer. “Try not to leave work at the same time every night,” the assessor said. 

I later sat through a finding of fact hearing with my usual air of detachment which I can now link to vicarious trauma. An expert medical witness was asked to demonstrate how violently the now blind baby had been assaulted. He rocked his arms vigorously back and forth. When asked to articulate further he said the last time he had seen such injuries was when a large, heavy TV had accidentally fallen on a baby’s head. 

I experienced more direct trauma when I bumped into the father and two of his mates in an isolated carpark. My heart pounding, I thought if he’s going to do me it will be now. Instead, he just muttered my name. Was this cowardice, or simply that he didn’t want his mates to know what he’d done? 

Some years after qualifying, the trainee worker described above quit. She later told me that she couldn’t drive past the family court without feeling sick and shaky or stop feelings of guilt, however inappropriately, about the baby as it had been her case. She then told me how in a drunken stupor one night she’d tried to end it all with some pills. 

In my final job in social work, a 12-year-old boy had been thrown out of a number of residential homes for aggressive behaviour. He rang me crying saying, “I loved it there, please tell them I’ve learnt my lesson and to give me another chance.”

This sobbing, vulnerable kid really got to me. 

If you are to have a career in social work exposure to some form of trauma is inevitable. Empathy by default makes you vulnerable to vicarious trauma and it’s easy to be drawn in. Ten years into my career the impact of this emotional rollercoaster caught up with me. Physically it led to panic attacks along with excessive sweating.

I also felt l an overwhelming sense of responsibility to challenge and rectify the social injustices that many of the people we work with face. A somewhat older, cynical, caustic colleague used to warn me I’d burn out. Unfortunately with regard to the job she was referring to she was absolutely right.

Clearly I’m not as tough as I think I am.

*Name changed to protect identities