Uses of the Trauma of Others: Insights from Two Ethnographic Studies of Human Service Workers

“Compassion fatigue” and “secondary traumatic stress” are clinical constructs developed to name the distress human services workers can experience when exposed to the trauma of the people they serve. We examine how human services workers mobilize the legitimacy and expansiveness of these constructs to respond to workplace demands. These clinically validated, yet persistently contested, constructs—in addition to being phenomena that happen to workers—are also resources that workers use to make ethicomoral claims regarding labor concerns. Synthesizing findings from two ethnographic studies of human services workers, we demonstrate that, although these constructs may name and legitimize distress, they also risk being used to minimize or obscure labor concerns when used to frame harm as a problem of individuals rather than as effects of organizational and political systems. We consider implications of these usages for human service organizations and their workers and for researchers and educators who use these constructs.