First, do no harm to self: Perspectives around trauma-informed practice and secondary traumatic stress among rural child protective services workers

Abstract

Existing research on child welfare removals has not fully contextualized the incipient trauma experienced by children during the removal process and has neglected ancillary impacts on intervening child welfare workers and intricate procedural challenges in rural environments. Applying a symbolic interactionist framework, this work presents a pilot case study consisting of semi-structured interviews with workers at a rural Child Protective Services agency who piloted a trauma-informed practice intervention and a program addressing workers’ secondary traumatic stress (STS). Results demonstrate that respondents generally felt that trauma-informed practice yielded fruit in reducing trauma/mental distress experienced by clients and improving recidivism/placement outcomes. Key intervention implementation barriers included sparse local resources for mental health referrals, broad community-level socioeconomic barriers, inconsistent engagement from state and local government stakeholders, and organizational stressors. Additionally, respondents indicated that STS was substantially impacting their professional and domestic lives, noting ways the intervention helped them begin to purposefully address the impacts of their trauma exposures. Collectively, findings from this case study highlight the interwoven psychosocial and system-level challenges facing child welfare workers and the ways in which trauma-informed practice may clarify and mitigate these obstacles, providing direction for further research in this space.