Dr Emma Tseris: The proliferation of trauma across the human services: Unpacking a ‘progressive’ concept.
Trauma-informed practices are proliferating in social work, and across the human services more broadly. Such practices are usually positioned as unproblematically positive and progressive, and they have been commended for offering a shift away from pathologising approaches. However, there is growing critical scholarship highlighting the limitations of trauma-informed practices in enacting social justice, instead illuminating the symptom-oriented and individual-focused discourses that permeate trauma-informed practices, and an increasingly amorphous understanding of the meaning of trauma-informed practice. This sits alongside a limited critical interrogation of the rise of neuro-centric perspectives that seek to predict the impacts of violence across the lifecourse. In this paper, I will argue that trauma-informed practices have become a popular approach to demonstrating a rhetorical engagement with ‘social justice’, while reinstating the professional power and expertise of psy-professionals. This is achieved by constructing victim-survivors of violence as ‘risky’ and ‘dysfunctional’, which justifies a range of oppressive practices, including paternalism, surveillance, and diverse forms of coercion. Such practices are wrapped up in notions of benevolence, leaving little room for critique. Consequently, there is an urgent need to consider whether the feminist and activist roots of the trauma paradigm can be re-discovered, or whether it is necessary to take a different direction in addressing and preventing interpersonal, institutional, and structural violence.
