ABSTRACT
Working within forensic settings offers both challenges and opportunities. The well-being of forensic professionals and organisations depends upon the culture, climate, and strengths which are cultivated. This chapter will focus specifically on the impact of trauma-informed working on staff within the critical occupation of forensic services. It will review the meaning of the terms critical occupation and trauma, and summarise the literature on specific traumatic impacts reported when working within forensic services. It will describe and clarify the variety of terms used within the literature to describe traumatic impacts within critical occupations (secondary traumatic stress, compassion fatigue, vicarious trauma, burnout). It will conclude by suggesting an approach to addressing traumatic impact which is framed by well evidenced trauma-informed stages – creating safety, facilitating emotional processing, and maintaining cognitive connections. It will include an integration of applied models of boundary management, resilience, and psychological formulation as well as trauma-informed service models and human learning systems approaches, which attend to integral trauma processes. Recommendations are made for greater research in this area along with a radical shift in systemic culture at the public management level in order to integrate trauma-focused perspectives and processes across individual, organisational, and public policy levels.
