Surprising Findings Regarding Secondary Trauma Among African American Child Welfare Workers

Introduction: Rates of clinical levels of Secondary Traumatic Stress (STS) symptomology among child welfare workers have been found to range between 34% and 75% (e.g., Bride, Jones & Macmaster, 2007; Purdy et al., under review). Those at higher risk for STS are those with 1) a personal history of trauma (e.g., Ivicic & Motta, 2017), 2) higher amounts of exposure to traumatized clients (e.g., Benuto et al., 2019), and 3) less perceived social support (e.g., Diehm et al., 2019). Results for various demographic variables such as race are mixed. There is a growing literature on race-based traumatic stress by BIPOC (e.g., Liu et al., 2020). Racial trauma is real or perceived discrimination that has a damaging impact on both physical and mental health through chronic and repeated exposure to stress (Comas-Diaz, Hall, & Neville, 2019). The literature focuses on how to assess and treat race-based traumatic stress reactions stemming from racism and discrimination (e.g., Anderson et al., 2019; Carter et al., 2017). There is not an emphasis on how race-based trauma might affect child welfare workers themselves. It is reasonable to assume that this is a form of trauma exposure for the BIPOC workforce making them more susceptible to secondary trauma. The current study addresses a gap in the literature by examining the role of race in STS among a large sample of child welfare workers.

Method: This cross-sectional study utilized secondary data from a convenience sample of front-line public child welfare workers who were part of a large-scale workforce development assessment process across twelve jurisdictions in four states (N=992). STS was measured using the STS Scale (Bride et al., 2004), a self-report instrument consisting of 17 items designed to assess the frequency of intrusion, avoidance, and arousal symptoms over the past week resulting from working with a traumatized population (α=.94). Items were further categorized into a dichotomous variable measuring whether or not the participant met criteria for a diagnosis of PTSD. Bivariate one-way MANOVAs, and multivariate linear regression analyses were employed.

Results: In the multivariate model race was statistically significant (B=-3.06, p<.01) controlling for gender and years of child welfare experience. Fifty-five percent of white workers vs. 46% of Black workers met the criteria for PTSD (χ=4.91, df=1, p<.03). There was a significant difference in mean STS arousal symptom scores (F(350.04)=17.50, p<0.001) between white workers (M=13.23, SD=4.37) and Black workers (M=11.74, SD=4.73).

Discussion: While this may seem like a positive finding, we posit that quite the opposite may be occurring. The pattern of results suggests that Black child welfare workers may not focus on symptoms of STS and may be less likely to engage in active coping strategies to manage the detrimental effects of the STS. The implications of this for the health of the Black child welfare workforce are tremendous. While observers of these workers may believe that they are thriving in the environment and give them a heavier caseload or offer less social support, internally their health may be in danger. Implications will be discussed