Trauma as the 'Belief That the World is a Dangerous Place': The Obfuscation of Systemic Violence in Social Work's Discourses of Trauma

The concept of psychological trauma has been taken up widely in popular culture and in diverse academic fields including social work. In this work of poststructuralist discourse analysis, we used methods of close reading to examine a random sample of thirty social work articles on trauma (published 2010-2020). Our aim was not to refute the salience of the concept nor to establish its true meaning and correct usage, but to critically examine its discursive functions; what does 'trauma' do in social work? In our analysis, the progressive aims of the discourses of trauma-to counter pathologisation and confer legitimacy to harms that have been marginalised-are unrealised. 'Trauma' is deployed in multiple, often contradictory ways and the slippages between intent and function work to construct the trauma-laden as non-normative, damaged subjects, and legitimate objects, thus, of social work scrutiny and intervention. Social work's discourses of trauma undermine their own efforts to centre a structural analysis. If 'to perceive the world as a safe place' is a signifier of normative, non-traumatised functioning, then what does 'trauma' do when applied to the racialised, gendered, colonised and marginalised, for whom the world is not a place of safety but of material and psychical violence? The concept of psychological trauma has become increasingly popular in mainstream media and in many academic and professional fields, including social work. Grounded in the perspective that language is a type of social practice, and that all social practices are always and already political, we examined a sample of thirty randomly chosen articles on trauma published in top social work journals between 2010 and 2020. The point of our study was not to reject the importance of 'trauma', nor to find a better, truer definition. Instead, we asked what does trauma do in social work: Why do we use this term? What do we mean when we use the term? Are there consequences-intended or not-for using the term in the particular ways that we do? In our analysis, the use of the 'trauma' in social work is well intended: for example to acknowledge significant harm, to depathologise people who have suffered significant harm and to open possibilities for repair. These goals, however, are not realised. Instead, 'trauma' is used in multiple contradictory ways that function to differentiate the normal from the abnormal, and in doing so, designate those affected by 'trauma' as a damaged population in need of social work intervention.