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

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.