Addressing the Indirect Trauma of Social Work Students in Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) Field Placements: A Framework for Supervision

Abstract

Intimate partner violence (IPV), which encompasses physical, sexual, financial, and/or emotional abuse in a dating or partner relationship, is a serious and prevalent issue that social workers respond to. IPV can create varying degrees of trauma among survivors, such as posttraumatic stress, hypervigilance, flashbacks, anxiety, and depression. Social workers play a key role in helping survivors of IPV recover from this trauma, which in turn puts them at risk of experiencing indirect trauma such as vicarious trauma, secondary traumatic stress, and compassion fatigue. Unfortunately, social work students are at an even greater risk of experiencing forms of indirect trauma as they are often unprepared to cope with exposure to trauma. While there have been studies on mitigating indirect trauma of practitioners working with survivors of IPV, there is a dearth of research on the experiences of social work students in IPV field placements, and on the crucial role of supervision in supporting students to cope with exposure to trauma. In response, this paper: (1) defines indirect trauma and trauma-related concepts; (2) proposes a conceptual framework for supervision that detects and addresses indirect trauma among social work students in field placements; and (3) illustrates this framework with case examples of MSW students within IPV field placements. Implications for social work practice are discussed throughout the paper.

Intimate partner aggression and work: An interdisciplinary review and agenda for future research

“…For example, the WHO definition specifically mentions controlling behaviors, while the current CDC definition does not. IPV is also defined differently across studies (e.g., Tarshis & Baird, 2019vs. Tjaden & Thoennes, 2000 or not defined at all (e.g., LeBlanc et al, 2014;Showalter et al, 2019).…”

Supervision for Advocacy: Supporting Self-Care

“…In addition to education, students of social work also need supervision for their practice. They can be exposed to the effects of trauma on peoples' lives during their field placements (Tarshis & Baird 2019) and during classwork at a time when global events create political trauma (Sondel et al 2018). Tarshis and Baird (2019) presented a good example of field placement supervision in Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) practice.…”

“…There is a need to teach students how to develop resilience to the experience of indirect trauma while working with clients in an IPV setting and to recognize that trauma my affect them at different environmental levels. To do that, the authors (Tarshis & Baird 2019) used both a TIC approach and ecological framework. In the ecological framework, students learn about the effects of trauma at personal, relational, community, and system levels.…”

“…They are educated about the role of racism, sexism, and different kinds of oppression on people from different social groups and about the transgenerational transmission of trauma. Supervisors may empower stu-dents to be engaged in global events that affect their population of clients or their own community (Mapp et al 2019;Tarshis & Baird 2019). Sondel, Baggett and Dunn (2018) discussed how certain global political events may traumatize large populations of people.…”

Exposure to trauma in intimate partner violence human service work: A scoping review.

“…It has been noted that the diagnostic criteria for PTSD are too limited to capture the breadth of experiences related to trauma exposure during IPV work; experts in the field cite the absence of a consensus definition of professional exposure to trauma as hindering a systematic research program toward the development of preventive and ameliorative interventions (Sprang, Ford, Kerig, & Bride, 2018; Tarshis & Baird, 2019). The purpose of this article is to improve the evidence base for intervention and policy development to mitigate the potential consequences of exposure to trauma for IPV HSPs, by summarizing and synthesizing the empirical scholarship investigating IPV HSPs and work-related exposure to trauma.…”