Taking Care at Work: Gender,Coping,and Anti-Violence Work During COVID-19

Abstract

COVID-19 transformed frontline anti-violence workers’ organizational routines by transitioning to virtual formats, decreasing face-to-face interactions, and shifting client needs. To address ever-changing workplace stressors, service providers adapted and/or modified coping mechanisms. In this paper, we analyze interviews with 23 anti-violence workers in the US Great Plains region, focusing on tactics used to avoid burnout and meet client needs. We discuss how workplace pace, direct-action coping practices, and a lack of inter/intra-agency social support impact how workers do their necessary jobs. Though some challenges were pervasive pre-pandemic, anti-violence workers’ experiences also highlight how “post-COVID-19” workplaces must adequately support staffers.

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to cause major disruptions locally and globally, from supply-chain delays to overburdened healthcare systems and increased job precarity. In the American workplace, COVID-19 is drastically reshaping daily routines and practices. With additional safety measures, remote work, and decreased face-to-face interactions, workers across a range of sectors have had to adapt to a new “normal,” even though “normal” labor conditions are increasingly revealed as unsustainable (North, 2021).

Our paper explores how service providers have adjusted to this “new normal,” drawing from scholarship on various coping styles (Menaghan & Merves, 1984; Parikh et al., 2004), organizational stress (Kahn, 1987; Zelnick et al. 2022), and street-level bureaucracy theory (Lipsky, 2010; Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2022). We specifically highlight shifting coping mechanisms in the anti-violence workplace. Service providers increasingly turned to pre-pandemic strategies, like the heightened focus and lengthier time commitment of direct-action coping (Gianakos, 2000, 2002), but found themselves risking its potential overuse. Direct-action coping may facilitate an immediate resolution of an organizational problem—which does “fix” a stressor—but that immediacy may require more time on the clock, more resources, and more threats of burnout. At the same time, routine practices like in-person collaboration and connection (Brown & O’Brien, 1998; Korczynski, 2003) became more inaccessible, shifting to virtual formats (Fiorentino et al., 2022) to mitigate viral transmission.

Our findings help unveil the ways we may think about drastically addressing the workplace stressors and “fragile systems” (Heward-Belle et al., 2021, p. 10) associated with gendered, high-stress workplaces—and remind us not to remain complacent with a return to pre-pandemic resources. If the coping strategies in a frontline worker's toolkit become imbued with a new layer of stress and strain, they may fail to adequately protect against burnout, especially in social welfare sectors like anti-violence service provision, where exhaustion and re-traumatization are often looming (Baird & Jenkins, 2003).

Anti-Violence Work as Frontline Work

The history of mainstream anti-violence advocacy is well beyond our scope. However, we would be remiss to ignore the tensions between the movement's grassroots beginnings and its current institutionalized forms (Jacquet, 2019; Thuma, 2019); lack of intersectional attention to victim-survivors outside of the white, middle-class, cisgender “everywoman” trope (Koyama, 2016; Richie, 2000); and enmeshments with the carceral state (Kim, 2020). With these considerations we approach anti-violence work with attention to its discretionary capacities to support victim-survivors (Hetling, 2011; Lindhorst & Padgett, 2005) and its descriptor as feminized labor for its workforce of “women working with women” (Bumiller, 2008, p. 3).

Frontline anti-violence work is challenging for a multitude of reasons. It encompasses high demands on emotional labor, especially when maintaining an empathetic display for clients in the aftermath of sexual violence (Mastracci et al., 2012). This emotional intensity also carries the high potential for secondhand or vicarious trauma (Baird & Jenkins, 2003). As with all street-level bureaucracies (Lipsky, 2010), anti-violence organizations regularly face limited financial or material resources, even after the professionalizing of these grassroots groups created more fiscal stability and access to philanthropic donations and grants (Wies, 2008). Given these obstacles, useful coping mechanisms become even more important for service providers in this sector.

Workplace Stress and Coping

Workplace stressors emerge in a range of potentially overlapping contexts, from unsafe working conditions and administrative surveillance to hostile organizational climates and poor relationships with coworkers (Kahn, 1987; Zelnick et al., 2022). Even things that feel more nebulous, like the temporal elements of working hours, affective exchanges in client encounters, and mismatched metrics of “productivity” or “positive outcomes” between workers and institutional norms (Zelnick & Abramovitz, 2020), can increase stress by destabilizing workplace routines and creating inconsistencies (Parikh et al., 2004). These stressors can build towards a plethora of secondary effects, including somatization, adverse physical and mental health conditions, and burnout ¹ (Parikh et al., 2004; Zelnick et al., 2022).

Previous studies have also found that role ambiguity and role overload drastically contribute to workplace stress (Kahn, 1987; Parikh et al., 2004; Triplett et al., 1996). Role ambiguity occurs when workers are unclear about the scope and responsibilities of their role. For frontline anti-violence workers, role ambiguity could take the form of tensions between stakeholders (Patterson & Pennefather, 2015) or perceived overstepping of professional boundaries (Payne, 2007) on an interdisciplinary rape crisis team.

Role overload can manifest in two ways. Quantitative role overload is the result of workers having too many things to accomplish and/or not having enough time to accomplish necessary tasks. In the face of increasing documentation accounting service providers’ adherence to workplace “benchmarks” (Zelnick et al., 2022), workers may literally need to distinguish between the “necessary” task of engaging with clients or filling out appropriate paperwork for grant reports. Qualitative role overload occurs when the task's needed level of quality exceeds workers’ abilities or accessible resources (Ivancevich & Matteson, 1980). For example, in Freund and Guez's (2018) study of role overload, social work supervisors could face quantitative role overload when adding student supervision to their preexisting duties or qualitative role overload when supervising students without learning the expectations of that supervisory role.

With respect to street-level bureaucracies, there are never enough accessible resources, particularly in the wake of drastic state- and federal-level cuts to social welfare programs alongside privatization (Zelnick & Abramovitz, 2020). Crisis conditions only exacerbate these preexisting disparities (Brodkin, 2021). Thus, some kind of role overload can feel almost inevitable in sectors where frontline workers are asked to always do more with less.

Direct-Action Coping

Unsurprisingly, control or autonomy in the workplace can mediate stress and strains on physical and mental health (Kahn, 1987; Parikh et al., 2004). However, this places frontline anti-violence workers in a unique position. Their discretionary latitude can conflict with their organizational environment, which might not offer control due to the lack of consistent hours (or pressure to take on more unpaid hours), available resources, or macro-level influence over systems that perpetuate violence (Baines, 2004; Wies, 2008; 2011). And when street-level bureaucrats are often described as responding to disruptions with well-tested routines (Lipsky, 2010), frontline workers in the anti-violence space have an institutional environment built upon disruptions, even crises. Brodkin (2021) identifies these moments of extremity during COVID-19 as the opportunity to respond to “sudden and overwhelming demands” (p. 20)—and the same phrase can be used to explain what Wies (2011) calls the “local suffering” anti-violence workers encounter daily (p. 4).

To rectify these conflicts, workers can use their available discretion to regain control by utilizing direct-action coping strategies—defined as agentic, “problem focused” strategies (Fortes-Ferreira et al., 2006, p. 293)—and going outside their job description to accomplish tasks. Some examples of direct-action coping include increasing work hours, work involvement, and effort to accomplish expected tasks, all to avoid stressors by solving identified problems (Gianakos, 2000, 2002). Direct-action coping is negatively correlated with emotional exhaustion, making it a better strategy to avoid burnout (Hu & Cheng, 2010).

Importantly, these are all coping strategies harnessed to one individual worker. Even if direct-action coping can “neutralize the stressor before its effect becomes harmful” (Fortes-Ferreira et al., 2006, p. 300), it still places the responsibility of minimizing systemic challenges onto singular actors. When one person cannot work hard enough to adequately distribute public goods and resources, direct-action coping risks pathologizing individual actors or displacing blame from macro-level structures onto micro-level actors. For those frontline workers who “often want to make an improvement in their clients’ lives” (Lipsky, 2010, p. 105)—what Baines (2004) calls “a workforce that is willing to sacrifice caring work time in the home, in order to avert the suffering of clients” (p. 283)—direct-action coping may eliminate one stressor at the expense of other personal needs or workplace responsibilities.

Menaghan and Merves (1984) offer a similar perspective, describing the limits of individual efforts to control emotional distress and occupational problems. Instead of solely measuring job satisfaction (Fortes-Ferreira et al., 2006), their work focuses on both emotional distress and occupational problems. They found direct-action coping was limited in its effects to reduce occupational problems, such as work overload and insufficient or undependable income, or levels of emotional distress. Further, direct-action strategies could potentially increase problems if this mechanism involved changing positions or taking on additional responsibilities.

Coping and Gendered Practices

Women, especially those whose gender performances match feminine norms, tend to occupy women-dominated fields ² with less pay, status, mobility, and decision-making latitude (Gianakos, 2000; Gianakos & Subich, 1988)—and more expectations of unpaid labor to meet client needs even outside of standard working hours and practices (Baines, 2004). These factors influence the coping mechanisms available in these sectors. Direct-action coping may be especially prominent here given that the intensity of the stress response is often determined by the perceived consequence of failing (Matheny et al., 2002; Watson et al., 2011). In the case of anti-violence work, this “failure” can feel more dire than an individual loss of job; it may be perceived as causing clients themselves to endure more violence or harm (Ullman & Townsend, 2007). This, combined with anti-violence workers’ perceptions of their work being meaningful and necessary (Bemiller & Williams, 2011; Walsh et al., 2020), may influence their willingness to implement direct-action coping strategies.

Additionally, women have been found to be more likely to seek out social support from friends, family, and colleagues for escapist coping methods, such as venting or expressing emotions, or emotional social support (Christie & Shultz, 1998; Olson & Shultz, 1994). The importance of social support is highlighted in Brown and O’Brien's (1998) study on shelter workers. Specifically, those “who perceive high levels of support from friends and family are more likely to experience feelings of job competence and successful achievement in their crisis intervention work” (pp. 384–5). This improved competence may, in turn, help undo the uncertainty or doubt that emerges with role ambiguity and extend to potentially prevent burnout.

Social support in the workplace can also be understood as part of what Korczynski (2003) calls communities of coping, “emergent, informal, oral-based, social modes of coping” (p. 57) that may be hidden from administrative oversight or spontaneously generated from casual encounters. Communities of coping are often communal at the peer-level, with coworkers navigating workplace challenges and celebrating successes together. Since clients/customers and managers may be the root of these challenges, higher-level staff are not as routinely imagined in these configurations of support. Strengthening these coworker ties by intentionally “encourag[ing] and facilitat[ing] mutual support between coworkers” can go so far as to buffer against burnout in the workplace (Hsieh, 2014, p. 396.)

Moving Towards/Away from Work

Managing workloads can also be a coping strategy, both in accepting more tasks and setting harder boundaries between self, clients, and labor. For example, in her study of anti-trafficking stakeholders, Schwarz (2021) discovered some service providers took on more tasks and activities “in the short-term to maintain longer-term benefits for themselves, clients, and coworkers” (p. 538). These benefits included the maintenance of limited resources, resistance to burnout faced by lower-level staffers, and cultivation of rapport with clients facing complex needs. Engaging in these practices longer-term did risk increasing labor without more staff, pay, or other resources, which can be compounding factors of burnout (Baird & Jenkins, 2003).

Similarly, Nurmi's (2011) study of distributed teams in the corporate workforce—coworkers whose collaborative tasks spanned locations and time zones—revealed the complications of taking on more work. For these teams to function, workers had longer commutes (for face-to-face meetings) and longer hours in the office (for remote work across time zones). Ironically, “these team-level coping strategies ended up acting as new sources of overload and strain to individuals” (p. 129). Adding this overload was necessary for successful collaboration, but, longer-term, required workers to draw upon their personal reserves of coping. Importantly, Nurmi (2011) found that this was often the only strategy at workers’ disposal due to the distributed office, inhibiting “the mobilization of social resources related to emotional, instrumental and informational social support” (p. 139). Communities of coping (Korczynski, 2003) are more challenging to cultivate when shared gaps in workplace routines and informal communication strategies are constrained by geographic, temporal, and technological distance.

Frontline workers also frequently attempt to create some space between themselves and their organizational roles. Mastracci et al. (2012) identify “the ability to deactivate their work personae at the end of the day” (p. 26) as a critical feature of coping for frontline workers in crisis management. But space can also be practical, reducing less essential practices that are not central to managing caseloads. Frontline workers use the discretion baked into their roles to “make their work easier by managing their caseloads; by focusing on easier clients; and by avoiding, dismissing, or reducing contact with unpleasant or impossible cases” (Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2022, p. 12). In the context of underfunded and understaffed street-level bureaucracies, “easier work” to prevent burnout is an understandable, though dissatisfying, goal. Especially for those workers drawn to frontline work for its distribution of public goods, these processes of triaging and skimming clients may feel like the only options when “confronted with heavy workloads and apparently impossible tasks (Lipsky, 2010, p. 107).

Tummers and Rocco (2015) highlight the ambivalences that emerge when creating more distance between self and work. Their research on health insurance navigators offered limited support for coping through harsher boundaries: strict adherence to rules as written, routinizing questionnaires, or rationing services to specific clients. In contrast to moving away from clients, framed as a “last resort” (p. 821), these frontline workers more commonly moved towards clients in responsive ways that risked increasing stressors. In fact, “moving toward clients was not always beneficial for frontline workers” (p. 824). Even in the face of extreme conditions when moving away from clients may be more understandable, Tummers and Rocco's interviewees kept client-informed practices in their repertoire at their own coping expense.

Research Methods

This article reflects research conducted in service of understanding the nuances of anti-violence service provision during COVID-19. We situate this project alongside Quinlan and Singh's (2020) exploration of Canadian domestic violence service provision and Heward-Belle et al.'s (2021) interviews with anti-violence health professionals in Australia. Author 1 and Author 2 joined to explore how the dual impacts of COVID-19 spread and mitigation strategies affected service providers in the anti-violence ³ sector. We were specifically interested in daily workplace routines, shifting client needs, and modifications to individual coping strategies. We developed a semi-structured interview mechanism to address these interests. This method aligns with a feminist ethic of egalitarianism and affords participants the latitude “to describe their experiences in their own terms” (Taylor, 1998, p. 366), which felt particularly salient during a public health crisis that exacerbated preexisting inequalities (Adler-Bolton, 2022).

Given the role of place in COVID-19 transmission and mitigation strategies—and the ongoing politicization of the pandemic (Pickup et al., 2020)—we selected two states in the US Great Plains region ⁴ for our study. They can be broadly understood as “Red States” with deep histories of defunded welfare systems, vast swaths of rural residents distanced from resources, and tensions between conservative individualism and regionally specific social niceties.

As detailed in our executive summary (Schwarz & Welch, 2021), we created our own sample of participants by using publicly accessible data from state-level anti-violence coalitions and Google keyword searches. This strategy allowed us to find larger institutions, often receiving grant funding or state support, as well as smaller, more grassroots groups with a narrower focus. We selected only those organizations with some degree of case management and/or public good distribution. This eliminated some groups that worked exclusively on education or policy, as well as faith-based organizations that only offered prayer groups or study circles. In sum, we created a list of 68 organizations across two states.

From there, we used phone numbers and email addresses to contact individuals and groups for interview participation. This process slightly varied between organizations, as some had full staff listings with corresponding contact information while others simply had one email address for the entire organization. Regardless of these differences, we intentionally sought out part- and full-time staffers who worked directly with victim-survivors in a frontline capacity. Our entire interview process lasted from November 2020 to August 2021, pre-vaccination rollout to roughly when the Delta variant began rolling across the Great Plains region (Center for Disease Control, 2023).

During this time, we conducted 21 Zoom or phone interviews—20 with individuals and one group interview—with 23 anti-violence service providers across 12 organizational locations. Since many anti-violence organizations cover multiple client needs, from forensic interviewing to case management and legal advocacy, we were able to get a range of roles represented across a smaller number of organizations. This also included 12 participants who identified as having an administrative role within their organization. While managers are not traditionally considered street-level bureaucrats (Lipsky, 2010), the fiscal constraints of anti-violence work can make the lines between administrators and frontline staffer blurrier.

In these interviews, we followed a semi-structured interview protocol with 11 questions, taking methodological cues from Maynard-Moody and Musheno's (2022) narrative prompts. We were particularly animated by how the authors describe this story-based approach as gathering “not facts or evidence waiting for interpretation” but “the embodiment of the storyteller's interpretation” (p. 26). Even though their responses are mediated by this kind of construction, the choices participants made in describing their workplace conditions—to foreground certain workplace stressors or offer certain examples of coping over others—shares meaningful information, even if it is not an identical snapshot. Author 2 conducted all the interviews, with Author 1 joining on two interviews as an observer in her role as a research assistant. Author 2 began each interview asking for service providers to provide a “day in the life” story, providing details about typical routines and pandemic-era practices. The protocol then moved through some of the smaller components of these routines—for example, how to navigate client needs, organizational policies, state and federal mandates, workplace challenges—before concluding with another storytelling request. Author 2 asked for a story that felt emblematic of working in the anti-violence sector during COVID-19 without restricting what emblematic could mean. This both granted service providers agency over sharing what felt relevant to them and created a range of stories with complex affective registers.

We recorded interviews with the Zoom platform or an audio recorder and uploaded these files to Otter.AI for assisted transcription. After generating the transcript, we read through it for clarity and accuracy, as well as a first pass at major themes. This article reflects our hybrid coding strategy (Fereday & Muir-Cochrane, 2006) that inductively discovered coping as a resonant theme (even beyond the coping-specific questions) and deductively created larger categories about workplace stressors, workload intensity, proximity to colleagues, and coping mechanisms based on our literature review. All quotes below are lightly edited for grammar. We use participants’ self-selected job title and interview date to maintain their confidentiality in alignment with our institutional review board approval (IRB-20-487) and to highlight the stage of the pandemic at which we conducted the interview.

Coping During COVID-19

Workplace Pace as Stressor

Workplaces adapted to viral mitigation efforts through the remote office, including a pivot to platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Given the intensity of their operations—especially in a climate that may have led to increased violence (Quinlan & Singh, 2020)—anti-violence workers were often left without a grace period for a technological learning curve (Heward-Belle et al., 2021). In fact, the need to adapt to new workplace practices brought their own set of stressors on top of pandemic anxiety. For our participants, pressures increased when workers felt compelled to speed up their job productivity while altering their standard workplace routines. Several described this as a strange, dichotomous feature of COVID-19: although it seemed like the world itself had slowed down, they had to keep pressing on without hesitation.

One community advocate explained that, in her three years of employment at a shelter, the year since COVID-19 hit had been the busiest she had ever experienced:

So just because […] the world unfortunately has slowed down or has had to stop temporarily, that didn’t necessarily mean that that's what happened in our job. […] Even though we weren’t necessarily hearing from everyday clients, we actually started hearing more from different clients throughout different counties. […] Not to say that our phones […] didn’t ring before, but it became a different type of volume. (interview 12/14/20)

There seemed to be a change in what was “normal” for workers to expect from a day in their jobs. While frontline anti-violence work was never calm or easy, this influx of new clients reflected the ways COVID-19 exacerbated dangerous situations, like cohabitating with an abuser, and limited individuals’ abilities to seek support without risk of viral exposure (Heward-Belle et al., 2021; Quinlan & Singh, 2020).

This increased intensity was mirrored by another interviewee, the founder and CEO of a faith-based anti-violence organization. Pre-COVID-19, their crisis line would rarely ring. During COVID-19, they “got to a point that the calls were going from 40 to 50 calls per month. Numbers jumped crazy over the phone” (interview 11/25/20). A shelter manager echoed this phenomenon, hypothesizing her organization's call volume was related to the fact that they stayed open during the pandemic: “We never shut down. We were open the whole time. And I think we got calls from other areas because their shelters were shut down” (interview 2/22/21). Service providers work with finite resources, so the additional pressures of growing caseloads alongside the ebbs and flows of COVID-19 took time away from other workplace routines.

However, this was not a uniform response. Some interviewees felt like they were able to slow down to learn new protocols, including coping strategies, early in COVID-19 shutdowns. For example, a therapeutic and community outreach staffer found relief in a slower pace: “The pandemic forced people to slow down and change some of the processes. […] Given […] everything that was happening, people were still getting their work done. Notes were still being done. Clients were still being served. People were happier. […] We didn't have any major crises” (interview 1/5/21). Even with these new conditions, certain benchmarks of stability or success remained consistent, like the completion of case notes or client meetings. In fact, morale seemed to improve even with the external stress of living through a global pandemic.

Knowing that coping may not involve a single practice but instead a repertoire of options (Triplett et al., 1996), this intentional shift in pace helped some frontline workers employ less utilized skills. As this therapeutic and community outreach staffer continued, she and her coworkers took time to engage in practices that worked for them without external constraints:

That was something that my supervisor and I intentionally tried to highlight over and over. […] “Hey, this is a time where you can pick up a book that we’ve been asking you all to maybe look into.” Or, like, “You’ve been talking about wanting to learn about transformative justice. Like, this is an awesome time to do that.” And like, let us take this opportunity to slow down. […] It doesn't mean that it's actually slowing down productivity. But also, that is productive. Like, it is productive to learn. It is productive to take care of yourself at work. (interview 1/5/21)

Ironically, this impulse to prioritize self-care is framed in the language of productivity, which carries connotations about normative labor expectations. While this particular anti-violence worker was drawing upon this framework to legitimize this shifting pace—slowing down and taking care as a way to resist burnout, a form of lost productivity—the expectations of a fast-paced work environment came to trump this temporary reprioritization.

After a major donor announced they would no longer be giving to this domestic violence organization, the CEO and administrative staff became fearful that other donors would also reduce their funding. Despite very little change in their service provision numbers, the work atmosphere stopped encouraging rest and became, “Okay, we got to get back to it. We got to start producing numbers. We can’t afford to lose any more money. […] It was like suddenly the pandemic was not the number one issue. […] It became […] secondary.” This reaction felt disheartening because she was “so proud” of how her organization had been handling both the pandemic and frontline worker care; the “shift in mindset from top leadership was, like, really heartbreaking because […] we had seen how well we can do, right?” (interview 1/5/21).

These experiences depict the tension between service providers’ workloads, personal health, and lack of resources. Workers became stuck when trying to balance these three components. Inconsistent funding for resources and staff made it difficult for workers to lighten their perennially burdensome workload. Without reducing this load, they remained unable to devote essential time to properly cope with their intense, emotionally demanding jobs. Intentionally creating a space to “slow down” would require more financial and material aid, the constant resource needs of a street-level bureaucracy (Lipsky, 2010).

Community Outside and Within the Workplace

Workplace closures across the United States due to the pandemic created new obstacles for service providers, as they had to decipher which resources would be available to their clients. Pre-COVID-19, workers would offer clients referrals to various outside agencies for housing, employment, food security, and other services. But they increasingly needed to keep track of which agencies were open with reduced hours, accepting new clients, using virtual platforms, or even closed completely before providing a referral. As interagency communication became more difficult, service providers’ workloads grew, and their time to dedicate to coping decreased.

When discussing this process, an advocate and policy staffer described it as trying to remove barriers for her clients: “My job is to make it as simple and as easy as I can for the client. So, I don’t want to send them […] on a wild goose chase. […] When I give them a referral, I want them to know details […]. This is the number you call. This is maybe what it might look like for you.” While this process may not look terribly different than before COVID-19, she took on more work to provide the same standard of care for her clients: “So it's kind of keeping in touch with everyone, local agencies, and saying, ‘Okay, so what are you all doing now? Are you capping your clients, like, at a certain number? Are you doing all over […] Zoom?” (interview 11/27/20). To use the language of direct-action coping, this staffer dedicated more time, energy, and labor—taking on more (Gianakos, 2000) to be “as helpful as possible”—to provide standard care by tracking down community partners, explicitly identifying their unique COVID-19 mitigation strategies, and determining if her clients would be served effectively.

This labor was especially difficult to maintain considering the extent to which interagency communication suffered under COVID-19, as noted by a shelter victim advocate:

I’ve been pairing with some agencies where they are working from home. And you call them, they answer, they help you out with whatever information you need, and it's good. But then other agencies, […] you’re just calling and no answer. And you just keep calling and calling and calling to try to get in contact and no answer. So then, at some point, you’re like, “Okay, well, calling is not working. I’m just gonna have to go up there to that agency.” But then you go to the agency, and then there's nobody in office. So, then it's like, “What do I do? I can’t reach you on the phone. Can’t reach you at the office. How am I supposed to get in touch with you?” (interview 12/16/20)

Even though this advocate's organization was providing resources to victim-survivors, other nodes in her network would not or could not, disrupting the standard flow of service provision. These challenges echo with frontline workers connected to the criminal legal system. As a therapist and mental health provider explained, she was unable to get her clients legal help because the courts in her jurisdiction were “shut down or limited” (interview 12/9/20). While this protected court staff, it also prolonged certain processes—especially for jurisdictions that did not develop a remote alternative (Baldwin et al., 2020)—and delayed information sharing.

Some service providers expressed difficulty understanding how other agencies made decisions that ended up hampering their ability to serve clients. One shelter victim advocate explained that her agency could not “go off the grid” because of the “impact that would have” (interview 12/16/20) in her community:

It's not that we have to do the same exact work, […] we can do this part. And you can do that part, and we can work together to help our community. So, when they do kind of go off the grid, […] I know that this is affecting me and my client, but how many other people is this affecting in our community? […] If we can just […] communicate together, […] we can strengthen the resources that we make available […] as well as ourselves. I mean, we’re people in the community too. (interview 12/16/20)

This sense of community between agencies and their shared commitment to clients was necessary for each agency and each worker to be able to fully help clients with their needs. There was a sense of “we’re all in this together” prior to COVID-19, which lessened when workplaces chose different ways of implementing safety protocols that further limited service provision.

Some service providers shared frustration or even betrayal in being one of the few organizations that remained open and in-person through the pandemic. An administrator and director of programs described the increased labor and stress this accessibility required. In her specific context, her organization worked alongside another organization that served as their partner for clients experiencing domestic violence. This partner organization did not remain open and in-person, leading to more work for other organizations in the community:

Our domestic violence provider did not put people on staff even when we put people on staff. So, our navigators were pretty much doing a whole lot of stuff. […] [They] felt really put upon and very angry. […] We didn’t have control over that, you know, because when you work in that collaborative, […] we’re the cog in the wheel. Each agency has their own policies and approaches, and then we have cumulative policies. […] So that was real hard for our staff. […] They were very angry. They felt like sacrificial lambs. […] They got multiple things piled on top of them that was not in their job description. […] That was hard for me to be quiet about. (interview 12/10/20)

Feeling like “sacrificial lambs” caused emotional turmoil, as workers felt they were no longer working in good faith alongside other community providers. Compounding this stress, this administrator also faced partners failing to communicate COVID-19 cases amongst staff who may have still been in close contact with her organization. Even though collaboration is necessary in anti-violence work (Lindhorst & Padgett, 2005), especially to navigate resource scarcity (Wies, 2008), it requires some shared base from which to work together: “To be collaborative is very difficult if you don’t have trust and you don’t have communication and you don’t have that connection, and, you know, it's rough” (interview 12/10/20).

Beyond interagency communication, workers’ ability to cope was also constrained by the lack of available, accessible social support and communal care (Korczynski, 2003). Given that safety protocols to mitigate COVID-19 often relied on a virtual pivot (Fiorentino et al., 2022; Heward-Belle et al., 2021; Ross et al., 2022), they encountered less casual face-to-face interaction and more formal intra-agency communication (Brown & O’Brien, 1998). Service providers frequently mentioned spontaneous “water cooler” conversations as a mechanism to sort through their own emotions, make the work less draining, and find solutions to obstacles that still maintained client confidentiality, as this manager explained:

One thing that has always helped me get through the work is […] when I could walk down the hall to the water cooler or get some coffee or see someone down the hall just in passing. And you could say, “Hey, this really tough thing just happened. Could I get feedback on it? Or can you even just, like, hold the weight of this trauma with me?” Or to add some levity to the situation of like, “Oh, my gosh, you’re never gonna believe what just happened,” and kind of share a laugh about it. And being able to have community with those people that understand the work that we’re doing in a way that maybe my personal support people just can’t quite get. (interview 2/22/21)

The use of escapist coping methods, like venting (Christie & Shultz, 1998; Olson & Shultz, 1994), within communities of coping (Korczynski, 2003) allowed service providers to carry the weight of their work with others. Yet venting became complicated when work-from-home policies, alternating schedules, and quarantines reduced informal outlets for this expression.

Similarly, a therapist and mental health provider described a major difference working from home without coworkers physically proximate and navigating her own coping independently:

Emotionally, it was also just nice to be able to, after a session, pop in and see someone and say, “Okay, I just need to sit on your floor for a second and debrief. Because that child just told me I’m a horrible person.” […] Or, “This kid just threw up on me, can I borrow?” […] It's emotionally a little bit more difficult, I think, to be home and alone in hearing, you know, trauma, after trauma after trauma. And have to be just fully responsible for your own mitigation of that. (interview 12/9/20)

As with the manager, this therapist and mental health provider found her community of coping in peers and colleagues doing the same kind of work, confronting similar forms of emotionally or physically dirty work (McMurray & Ward, 2014). Even though work-from-home policies may have eliminated the physical dirt of, for example, cleaning up vomit on the job, the emotional dirt of taking on clients’ trauma is still present—and the ease of immediate debriefing to help cope with workplace challenges is less possible.

Adding More to Caseloads

The most popular individual strategy reflected in our interviews was direct-action coping. This manifested as taking on additional workplace responsibilities, increasing resource provision for clients, going outside of their job description to accomplish tasks, and increasing hours worked per week. Managers and administrators—ironically, those intentionally framed as outside of Korczynski's (2003) communities of coping due to the surveillance and control of their higher-level roles—were explicit in their intentional increase of responsibility to staff. They took on more frontline or background work to avoid placing that expectation onto already-burdened case managers, therapists, or outreach staffers.

For example, when one administrator's office closed as a risk mitigation strategy, she forwarded all hotline calls to her personal cell phone. Every four hours, she rotated this responsibility among other staff members: “So it would be like, one o’clock in the morning and my alarm goes off. And I’m like [beeping noises], ships it off to somebody else.” Even though administrative roles might fall close to a nine-to-five schedule, during the first wave of COVID-19, this administrator was essentially always on:

I would be driving, and, like, my alarm would go off, and I would have to pull over to the side of the road just to […] pull up the schedule. […] And I’m like, forwarding, and I was so tired. It was seven days a week. Like, nobody else could do it, and nobody else should have done it. I would never ask my staff to do that. So, it was like, “All right, […] it's sink or swim time, like, let's go.” It was terrible. (interview 7/21/21)

Instead of splitting this necessary task among various employees, she felt it was her duty as an administrator to distance her fellow workers from such an extreme shift in workload. This additional workplace responsibility was so heightened, primed to dissolve already thin work/life boundaries, she felt as though she could not burden anyone else with this intense rhythm.

One manager and therapy provider expressed how she almost accidentally fell into the role of being a source of “support for staff.” Upon transitioning to weekly virtual staff meetings, she became responsible for creating activities such as trivia games to help “set the tone” and “normalize feeling like super scared, and weird and depressed, and like, anxious” (interview 1/5/21). These additional tasks were more aligned with a human resources role—and her anti-violence organization was large enough to have an HR department—but this emphasis on normalizing the challenges of living under a pandemic felt almost beyond a clinical or corporate approach to staff wellness. Setting a tone that feels authentic to frontline anti-violence work might be best accomplished by someone closer to those conditions, and it is still additional, uncompensated labor beyond this manager and therapy provider's traditional scope of duties.

Additionally, service providers articulated an obligation to provide clients more resources and information to help mitigate the additional obstacles and dangers associated with COVID-19. In the case of a small, culturally specific organization, the founder and executive director led her few staffers in educating themselves on CDC guidelines and interpreting them to “the best of [their] abilities” for Spanish-speaking clients. This duty also caused deep distress after learning that one client died from contracting COVID-19: “There was a lot of attachment with her. So, it was really hard for us to find out she had passed away. And then […] the advocate […] guilt because it's like, ‘Well, did we not provide the proper information? Were we giving out enough information? Like, what happened?’” (interview 11/25/20). Rather than reflecting on limited state-level COVID-19 mitigation efforts, this executive director felt an intense sense of individualized blame, leading to her organization providing grief counseling for staffers.

Because of COVID-19's impact on clients’ material needs, service providers found themselves adding new tasks to their daily repertoire, including direct resource access. Even though they felt unprepared for these tasks, often because they were part of another organization's repertoire pre-pandemic, service providers put themselves in increasingly risky situations to distribute necessary supports. For example, this same founder and executive director explained that, in response to food scarcity, she and her staff would risk COVID-19 exposure by going to local food banks instead of just offering a referral:

We had to go look for food. So, we were doing things that maybe we shouldn’t have been doing, but we were trying to fill that need because we understood that […] a lot of the clients that we serve, they’re cleaning houses, working in restaurants, doing maintenance. […] There's no type of assistance for them. (interview 11/25/20)

There was a belief that if service providers did not provide this aid for clients, no one would. Especially given their client base—some of whom were undocumented or non-native English speakers—this extra labor and its risks were easily rationalized away due to the reality of COVID-19 supports ignoring already marginalized populations (Murugan et al., 2022; Page & Flores-Miller, 2021; Tsui et al., 2022).

Instead of seeing this as a failure of the overall system, one coordinator saw it as an “opportunity to do things that [they] wouldn’t ordinarily do and just try to help people out” (interview 11/24/20). This flexible dynamic was fairly unexpected given existing literature on role ambiguity, which frames it as an additional stressor for workers unclear of the scope and scale of their responsibilities (Kahn, 1987; Parikh et al., 2004; Triplett et al., 1996). The service providers we interviewed seemed conscious of their role expectations but intentionally went beyond them. They overwrote the expectations of their official positions and performed acts that they felt were necessary to help clients, regardless of their formal job descriptions.

Despite wanting to do anything to help clients, this was sometimes out of workers’ control. While this dynamic existed pre-pandemic, these feelings of helplessness were compounded by the limitations of their roles during COVID-19. One case manager explained how COVID-19 distancing practices kept her from her standard practices of literally meeting clients where they were at: “I had one young lady who had been missing from care for quite some time. We were very concerned about her. She calls me, like, May or something. […] ‘Come and get me, I need.’ I can’t. I can’t put you in my car.” Pre-pandemic, this case manager could drive to a specific location and pick up a client in distress but, given COVID-19, being present during “someone's darkest time” (interview 11/20/20) was no longer a possibility.

Fully separating themselves from work—the opposite of direct-action coping—was described as a “last resort” (Tummers & Rocco, 2015, p. 821) workers decided on to better serve clients in the future. Though separation could create the impression that some workers do not care about the gravity of their daily routines and challenges, it also buffers against burnout and attempt to preserve long-term workplace engagement for others. For example, one manager and forensic interviewer explained how this coping strategy was already necessary before COVID-19: “Vicarious trauma is very prevalent in our job. […] We make sure we take a lot of time to do self-care. […] It's hard to hear trauma and deal with trauma and view graphic images. (interview 11/19/20). Because her workplace offered and encouraged wellness days separate from paid time off, an organizational culture that emphasized separation as care, not dismissal, emerged.

This perspective was echoed by a manager and therapy provider who described her firm boundaries as a way to make the work feel more sustainable. As she explained, “[It] helps me, like, then have energy to actually empathize and be compassionate. I mean, […] actually do something the next day where I don’t feel burnt out with my clients, because I always want to be, like, 100% with them” (interview 1/5/21). Here, self-care is a prioritized responsibility. Taking time away from work is not an indulgence, nor is it an opening to apologize for sacrificing further. It is required to be an effective advocate in the face of violence. Without this intentional disconnection, the all-consuming nature of anti-violence work, what Wies (2011) describes as “the emphasis […] to give up oneself for another” (p. 6), could easily take over.

Conclusion

Frontline anti-violence work requires skill, dedication, flexibility, and exceptional self-awareness to efficiently provide services without reaching burnout. However, without proper resources and management strategies, this may not be possible. Our findings display an overwhelmingly common sentiment: coping in this field is difficult, even without the press of an ongoing pandemic. Anti-violence workers were already underrecognized for their essential labor before COVID-19 (Cederbaum et al., 2022), doing what one therapeutic and community outreach staffer described as “doing work that is already burning people out, that already needed to be reassessed” (interview 1/5/21). COVID-19 presents a clear opening for reassessing the conditions of precarity under which anti-violence service provides always already work (Wies, 2011)—which requires us to think about major systemic changes.

Frontline workers in this women-dominated field reported using direct-action coping mechanisms, in alignment with existing scholarship (Matheny et al., 2002; Watson et al., 2011). But in the face of ongoing pandemic stressors and mediated in-person community, these strategies risk harm to workers by potentially continuing increased time commitments, role responsibilities, and opportunities for viral exposure. While our findings see the challenges to extended use of these strategies, we do not see this as representative of individual workers incorrectly coping. Rather, the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted various structural limitations that shape service provision in social welfare sectors.

While we specifically chose to study service providers’ coping strategies under COVID-19, our findings extend beyond a theoretically post-pandemic world. COVID-19 has highlighted the problems in navigating workers’ coping abilities—and allows us an opportunity for intervention, in line with Roy's (2020) framing of the pandemic as a portal, “a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves” (n. pag). Going “back to normal” is not necessarily what frontline workers need or want, as this still places them in understaffed environments with limited resources where their needs are not typically valued. In many ways, we are advocating for a radical reconceptualization of how anti-violence work in the social welfare sector is prioritized and funded by both state and non-state actors—and, even more broadly, a world where the social conditions that perpetuate violence are eliminated (Cederbaum et al., 2022; Heward-Belle et al., 2021; Tsui et al., 2022).

But as we move towards that macro-level shift, we also want to think about individual workers at this moment. We cannot co-create this future if anti-violence workers are so burnt out that they quit, leaving us without a generation of highly skilled frontline workers whose labor is vital to community health. In the short-term, we suggest immediately providing anti-violence workers with better opportunities to determine the best course of action for their own well-being without pressure to resort to any single coping mechanism, such as direct-action coping or communal coping. This could look like continuing COVID-19-era adaptations, such as increased access to paid and unpaid sick leave and respecting workers’ autonomy in choosing virtual or in-person modalities (Garcia et al., 2022; Shadik et al., 2023). The fast-paced, high-stress nature of anti-violence work limits discretionary capacity to select effective coping strategies. In our research, we saw that, when workers were able to slow down and adjust accordingly on their own terms, they were more likely to be attentive to their mental health and avoid pushing past their limits. While this may feel like a small recommendation, the simple ability to honor choice, especially during a time of upheaval, is a critical first step on a path towards a more humane workplace after COVID-19.