Reducing Law Enforcement Vicarious Trauma through a Pilot Training and Prevention Program

Family Support Line (FSL)’s Delaware County Children’s Advocacy Center (DCCAC) has experienced a significant increase in demand for services for children who have been victims of sexual abuse, commercial exploitation (sex trafficking, pornography, and more), and witness to violent crime since the start of the pandemic. To wit, the DCCAC has seen an increase in demand of close to 50%. 

An accredited Children’s Advocacy Center, the DCCAC follows the National Children’s Alliance (NCA) Standards.  The NCA model relies heavily on a committed and collaborative multidisciplinary investigative team (MDT).  The DCCAC MDT has members from over 60 agencies, including all 47 law enforcement agencies and six victim services agencies in Delaware County. With the rise in demand for services, FSL has recognized the vicarious trauma law enforcement professionals, social workers, therapists, and case managers experience from working with these children. 

Everyday law enforcement professionals work on the front lines with maltreated children and their families. The very nature of their work with child sexual abuse victims and families can have a significant impact on their emotional wellbeing and ability to effectively perform their jobs, potentially limiting quality service delivery and negatively contributing to overall workforce capacity issues such as turnover. Law enforcement professionals play an important role in protecting children in the community and while these professionals are committed to doing so, this commitment opens them to a significant level of traumatic stimuli and emotional and psychological reactions that are defined as vicarious trauma. At Family Support Line’s DCCAC, law enforcement and other professionals experience work-related trauma exposure comes from investigating the sexual abuse of children, listening to children recount their victimization during forensic interviews, reviewing videos of exploited children, case files, and more.

With the root cause of the vicarious trauma experienced by members of the MDT being the exposure to traumatic stories and experiences of sexually abused children, Family Support Line is creating a Pilot and Training Prevention Program to combat the vicarious trauma experienced by law enforcement professionals and members of the MDT, that 1) train law enforcement and other MDT members on how to gather minimal facts for referring victims to services, to reduce exposure to secondary trauma, 2) reduce the number of child victims of sexual abuse through prevention education, and 3) provide training for self-care and peer support to lessen the effects of vicarious trauma for law enforcement professionals and other members of the MDT.