Emotional Labor within Coordinated Services for Rape Victims: Investigating the Invisible Labor in Multidisciplinary Service Delivery Models

Background/Purpose: 

Many communities have adopted multidisciplinary team approaches for serving sexual assault survivors, often called Sexual Assault Response Teams (SARTs). Research suggests that these teams may struggle to overcome disciplinary differences and balance the perspectives and priorities of the different service sectors.  Research has identified conflict in SARTs stemming from role ambiguity, varying confidentiality standards, and differing notions of who has power and credibility to direct the work of the team.  This study explores how SART members’ engagement in and valuing of the emotional labor involved in serving rape victims may help explain some of the tensions within SARTs. Emotional labor is an essential component of responding to survivors of sexual assault and includes both relational practice and emotional intelligence (Fletcher, 1999). Historically, emotional labor has been gendered feminine, devalued and rendered as “invisible labor”. Yet, emotional labor is also a core skill set for many professions, such as nurses and the police, who work with people in vulnerable circumstances (Martin, 1997). This study investigates how emotional labor is experienced and described by professionals working within these interdisciplinary teams.

 Method:  Analysis drew on semi-structured interviews with 24 professionals involved in coordinating services for rape victims using a stratified sampling process to ensure a balanced distribution of common members of SARTs such as nurses, police, and advocates. Transcribed interviews were analyzed qualitatively using thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006), paying particular attention to implicit and explicit discussions of emotional labor.

 Results:  Participants described three aspects of SART work that require emotional labor: 1) working with victims (emotional support, listening, and validating), 2) working as a team (negotiating relationships with one another), and 3) interacting outside of the team, such as managing one’s identity doing “rape work” with other co-workers and the public. SART members described that their team often looked to advocates to perform the bulk of the victim-oriented emotional labor while also underestimating both the skill and value of this work (e.g. describing it as “handholding”).  SART members, particularly advocates, also described as a particular kind of emotional labor, the practice of "false face" (Hochschild, 1983), whereby they repress their emotions to maintain team cohesion, provide victim-centered services, or dispel misconceptions about sexual violence.  Law enforcement, and to a lesser extent nurses, described organizational contexts that devalue emotional labor, creating an environment in which they simultaneously acknowledge the need for emotional labor but where engaging in such practice creates professional identity conflicts. Overall, emotional labor was devalued when SART members framed it is disconnected from and less skilled than the procedural nature of police work or medical care.  

Implications:   These findings suggest that emotional labor has been devalued, rendered as "invisible labor," and is unevenly disbursed among SART professionals.  At the same time, SART members described how emotional labor was essential to promoting victim participation in criminal prosecution. SARTS should engage in cross-training that focuses on understanding the skill involved in  emotional labor and its value as a tool for providing effective victim-centered services and maintaining team cohesion.