You could be ME! The Costs of Caring and Trauma Transference

• In Event: 4422 - Section on Sociology of Law Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 02. Legal Actors and Practice

Abstract

Legal professionals assisting victims seeking civil protection orders mare exposed to traumatic stressors and may themselves be traumatized. I examine how the emotional labor of attorneys, paralegals, and other legal workers may function as a mechanism of trauma transference by actively listening, clarifying, and recording incidents of abuse. Feeling rules that guide intake workers’ behavior, such as the belief that one can never cry in front of a client, reflect a type of workplace emotion regulation. I argue that whether workers maintain affective neutrality or a high level of empathetic engagement leads to differential outcomes for the level of assistance victims receive and workers’ well-being. By investigating the distribution of emotional labor in legal institutions I build upon existing scholarship on victimization, emotional labor, and stress literature. Through in-depth interviews, I identify four major themes 1) clients are in ‘active trauma’, 2) workers employ a variety of therapeutic strategies to assist victims in recalling relevant details and dates, 3) feeling rules and emotional labor established for intake workers takes an emotional and sometimes physical toll, 4) Lower status intake workers may bear a larger share of emotional labor so that expectations of empathetic engagements and its consequences are not equally distributed. Understanding feeling rules for legal actors and their potential consequences provides new avenues of study to examine the sources and consequences of power inequalities in the legal system.

Author

• Anne Groggel, Indiana University