Moral Injury in Social Work: An Experiential Model to Shape Future Research

Moral injury is defined by the Syracuse Moral Injury Project (https://moralinjuryproject.syr.edu/) as the damage done to one's conscience or moral compass when that person perpetrates, witnesses, or fails to prevent acts that transgress one's own beliefs, values, or codes of conduct. Some of the experiences of moral injury include deep guilt or shame, alienation, moral disruption, and a sense of betrayal by organizations, systems, and superiors. In general, moral injury involves betrayal of trust and judgment by a person with legitimized authority in a situation with high-risk ramifications.

Despite most moral injury being focused on the experience of military veterans, social workers, especially in child welfare, are likely to struggle with moral injury, both through vicarious experience and as an agent of the child welfare system. More recent moral injury research in social work has drawn parallels to a shared experience with doctors and nurses that transcends burnout, where doctors, nurses, and social workers cannot provide the care they want for patients due to systems challenges such as client poverty or insurance restrictions. While many dimensions of social work practice involve high-stakes decisions and ethical dilemmas, the state of the literature on the topic is concentrated among a small handful of scholars, predominantly in child welfare (Haight), medical social work (Thibodeau), and ethics (Reamer). However, many areas of social work practice beyond medical social work and child welfare could constitute arenas in which social workers could both experience and perpetrate moral injury, particularly work in interpersonal violence, community practice, and administration. Work by people such as Margulies (Under the Cover of Kindness) and Chapman & Withers (A Violent History of Benevolence) highlight social workers historical challenges between someone who brings help and someone who brings considerable harm - and sometimes embodying both at once.

This roundtable proposes the first draft of a generalized model of moral injury in social work beyond the medical field. We will present psychometric concepts similar or adjacent to moral injury (including burnout and just-world theory) and discuss how these could be used in such research. We will then examine moral injury as a construct in relationship to agency supervision and administration, social work departments in universities, and child welfare. Finally we propose a kind of post-traumatic growth beyond moral injury that fuels activist social work and community organizing.

We invite anyone who experientially understands that burnout itself is not enough to explain the weariness and exhaustion of street-level social workers, as well as people who want to more deeply interrogate some of the tensions inherent in our discipline, to join us for this roundtable discussion.