The psychological cost of exposure to traumatic events is receiving greater recognition in recent years, especially in terms of its impact in helping professions and emergency services. However, the costs to researchers remain relatively unexplored. In this article, we will discuss the nature and impact of vicarious trauma using two criminological research projects as case studies: one a qualitative project engaging with survivors of childhood sexual abuse, and the other, a quantitative analysis of police hate crime reports. In addition to considering the trauma elicited in fieldwork such as interviews, we interrogate the costs imposed on researchers during the coding and analysing processes. We suggest that the cost is potentially greater when the researcher has a personal connection with the issues being researched, but that this personal experience also provides the researcher with important skills for responding to new or compounded trauma. The costs of engagement with trauma may be compensated by the productive outputs and impact on policy and practice that this type of research may elicit. Understanding the impact and costs of engaging with close analyses of trauma is critical in developing more robust and ethical research processes to ensure that this trauma is appropriately managed so as to avert the long-term damage this work can inflict on researchers and participants.
Grandparents become custodial carers of their grandchildren for a variety of reasons, including love, fear of losing the children to the system, efforts to protect children while managing relationships with the adult child (parent), policy impetus, and even for the convenience of child protection systems. As obvious candidates for care provision, grandparents report feeling pressured to take on care, and yet many grandcarers are poorly supported and feel taken for granted. Drawing on a mixed method study of grandparent carers and service providers located in Western Australia, we argue that there are important issues of inequity and injustice associated with being a grandcarer, in particular due to systemic and discursive failures to recognize the complexity and challenges of care provision. Misrecognition and epistemic injustice result in further marginalization and disempowerment, compounding barriers to accessing services and supports, which in turn impact upon child and family wellbeing. The aim of this article is to analyse the complex circumstances described by grandcarers and service providers in interview and survey data, highlighting issues of inequity and injustice and therefore areas for improving policy and services to support grandfamilies.
Working from a trauma informed lens is increasingly recognized as a vital component of social work practice, as is learning from and incorporating lived experience into one's approach to practice. Further, the critical and feminist informed interrogation of dominant ideas around professional power and expertise within social work practice is necessary in learning and teaching about trauma. This conceptual article describes an integrated approach to teaching fourth year Australian social work students in the area of violence, abuse, and trauma. The intentionally immersive learning and teaching framework presents and incorporates praxis as involving educator lived experience, theoretical knowledge, and practice experience. The approach aims to create transformative and embodied learning opportunities which destabilize dominant constructions of social work identities, use of professional power and different practice approaches. While honoring the valuable contributions of trauma informed practice, we seek to push students beyond this model, prompting critical feminist analysis of the socio-political complexity of trauma experiences. We describe our work, ambitions, challenges, and learnings as feminist educators, sharing these ideas in order to provoke dialogue on possibilities for pedagogical innovation, within the context of power, expertise, social work education, and lived experience.
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