“It's Like Being a Parent at Work”: Antiviolence Frontline Work,Boundaries,and Intimacy During COVID-19

Abstract

COVID-19 profoundly shaped how service providers in the antiviolence sector interact with clients, coworkers, and community stakeholders. In addition to stressors inherent in antiviolence work, service providers negotiated new, challenging social distancing and remote communication strategies. In this paper, we analyze interviews with 23 antiviolence workers in the US Great Plains region, focusing on participants’ descriptions of workplace boundaries and intimacy. We demonstrate how COVID-19 both expanded and contracted public/private boundaries and formal/informal connections in antiviolence workers’ daily experiences. Pandemic conditions revealed the pressing need for frontline workers to exercise discretion over levels of intimate engagement with coworkers and clients.

Introduction

Since the first surge of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, media and nonprofit press releases have highlighted the rise of a corresponding public health crisis. Domestic and intimate partner violence ¹ became the “pandemic within a pandemic” (Evans et al., 2020), attributed to what Quinlan and Singh (2020, p. 575) call the “perfect storm of conditions that bolster the power and control of abusers” proliferating under the stress of lockdown orders, economic precarity, and familial conflict. In an unfortunate turn, COVID-19 precautions designed to keep people “safer at home” (Kofman & Garfin, 2020) isolated victim-survivors ² of abuse with those perpetrating violence against them.

The “pandemic within a pandemic” also resulted in difficulties for service providers in the antiviolence arena, including fluctuating case numbers, funding crises, and limited staff scheduling. Those at the frontlines of “essential” service provision—case managers, therapists, housing coordinators, and administrators, to name only a few—found their work with clients, coworkers, and community stakeholders profoundly unsettled by the pandemic (Brodkin, 2021; Møller, 2021). This work was already complicated pre-COVID-19, involving the pivot between mundane bureaucracies, resource limitations, and affective retellings of violence and trauma (Sweet, 2019), spaces that require different levels of intimacy and proximity.

In this paper, we build on a growing body of scholarship centering these antiviolence service providers (Garcia et al., 2022; Lipp & Johnson, 2022; Murugan et al. 2022; Renov et al., 2022; Shadik et al., 2023; Toros et al., 2023), highlighting the tensions of working in a sector positioned toward a public good—ameliorating and preventing violence—while facing increasingly risky, taxing, and boundary-pushing workplace conditions. Using insights from street-level bureaucracy theory (Lipsky, 2010; Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2003), which intentionally foregrounds frontline workers, and critical explorations of work/home dynamics (Kumar & Makarova, 2008; Miranda-Nieto & Boccagni, 2020), we show how COVID-19 expanded and contracted public/private boundaries in antiviolence workers’ daily experiences. Thus, this research adds to the extensive, necessary body of scholarship exploring violence against women under COVID-19 (Evans et al., 2020; Kofman & Garfin, 2020; Leslie & Wilson, 2020; Quinlan & Singh, 2020; Sorenson et al., 2021) from another angle. If victim-survivors are facing conditions of violence unique to pandemic-era living, how are service providers shifting their advocacy, resource distribution, and client contact strategies to meet these changing needs?

We analyze interview data from 23 frontline workers in the US Great Plains region ³ who work broadly in the antiviolence arena to explore these new or escalating challenges. Service providers shared complex, contradictory feelings about shifting boundaries and intimacy in the socially distanced COVID-19 workplace. Remote work transformed workplace intimacy, reducing opportunities for organic, in-person problem-solving while simultaneously expanding formalized, scheduled connection. As well, service providers shared new strategies of care and health promotion, which function in a similarly complex structure of attentiveness and monitoring.

In many ways, these service providers articulated similar concerns as their street-level counterparts in public education (Tackie, 2022) and housing support (Goodwin et al., 2022). These commonalities point to important overlaps in how various frontline sectors navigated pandemic-era challenges—and how cross-sector solidarity could help ameliorate harmful workplace conditions as we continue to live through viral transmissions and infections. If COVID-19 has changed the future of work, we must look toward these insights from antiviolence frontline providers and the tension they identify between dissolving arbitrary boundaries and maintaining protective emotional distance.

Degrees of Frontline Work During COVID-19

Antiviolence service provision falls under the overlapping rubrics of street-level bureaucracies and frontline work. Street-level bureaucrats “interact directly with citizens in the course of their jobs, and who have substantial discretion in the execution of their work” (Lipsky, 2010, p. 3). These workers operate in service of some public good, from teachers tasked with educating public school students (Morill & Musheno, 2018) to law enforcement officers ostensibly maintaining public peace (Epp et al., 2014) and welfare case managers helping clients fill out paperwork for state and federal benefits (Soss et al., 2011). Most street-level bureaucrats do more with less, as their distribution of public goods occurs in sectors that face the threat of privatization alongside dwindling resources and limited state and federal-level financial supports (Lipsky, 2010), with increasing law enforcement budgets a notable exception (Root, 2022).

Importantly, not every frontline worker is traditionally imagined as part of a street-level bureaucracy, especially if their labor does not provide a normative public good. For example, Musheno et al.'s (2021) analysis of pandemic-era “essential work” news coverage shows how these terms function as if they are in a Venn diagram. Some frontline workers, like grocery store clerks, do not cross into the terrain of street-level bureaucracies because their labor—though critically important for daily functioning—is in a retail sector not imagined as distributing public goods. Other street-level bureaucrats, like 911 emergency operators, may not be physically proximate (at the frontlines of contact) in their encounters but distribute an inarguable public good. Antiviolence workers cross these categories, as they are both face to face with their clients (even if mediated virtually) and trusted with distributing public goods to victim-survivors through their advocacy and case coordination (Wies, 2008)

As the examples above implicitly highlight, frontline work—even work done with some general “good” in mind—does not always mean positively charged or affirmingly received labor. This double-edge of service provision stems from discretion, which is always already part of street-level bureaucrats’ daily routines. Lipsky (2010) sees discretion as inherent due to the “human dimensions” of frontline work: “They have discretion because the accepted definitions of their tasks call for sensitive observation and judgment, which are not reducible to programmed formats” (p. 15). Frontline workers may be given a set of protocols, standardized systems, or policies to navigate their interactions with clients, but these rules may reflect the most neutrally constructed version of a client encounter.

This discretionary ability to mobilize policy through practice felt particularly salient during the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the patchwork of local, state, and federal policies shaping mask adherence, social distancing, and office closures, frontline workers were often forced to make meaning of precautions across contradictory, imperfect rules (Curley et al., 2021; National Academy for State Health Policy, 2022). Complicating things further, clients of these street-level bureaucracies were not necessarily contained to a specific geographic region and bring with them competing understandings of rule abidance—for example, they may not have to wear a mask at their local grocery store, and the request to wear one for case management services or therapeutic care could feel intense or confusing.

Street-Level Bureaucrats, Boundaries, and Intimacy

Street-level work is proximate work. Dubois (2010) calls it work “at the desk,” where the physicality of the administrator's desk may be the only thing separating them from “the most intimate and important aspects of people's lives” (p. 3). Desk work should not imply a clinical nature or a robot on auto-pilot—even though that can be a coping strategy for some street-level bureaucrats when faced with increasing work demands and limited resources (Lipsky, 2010). As Maynard-Moody and Musheno (2003) explain, street-level bureaucrats’ “decisions are based on practical knowledge and judgments about people and are improvisational in the face of unpredictability” (p. 23). In nearly all frontline sectors, service providers are routinely confronted with the inescapably human parts of their job: the physical appearance of clients, the tenor of their voice, and the body language they give off or try to hide. Their proximity to clients can be a source of knowledge or an escalation of preexisting challenges, leading to different improvisations of service provision across clients.

Emotions from both clients and service providers add to these inescapably human elements. Guy et al. (2008) evocatively describe emotion work in street-level bureaucracies as “fine background music,” the affective grease that can smooth the wheels of sticky or tricky client encounters: “Unbeknownst to the citizen, it facilitates interaction and elicits a desired response contributing to productivity from the agency's point of view and achieving the goal of the exchange from the citizen's point of view” (p. 10). Though this phrasing might read as calculated, especially considering how “productivity” can get weaponized to reduce direct contact and facilitate more mechanical processes, Guy et al. (2008) are quick to emphasize that the emotion work draws many to frontline sectors, as “helping others gives a sense of meaning to life, but not being able to help is stressful” (p. 32). The highs of assisting a client—and the positive emotions generated through that engagement—coexist with blocked paths, bureaucratic mazes, and increasing burnout in the face of stress and negative feelings.

For those in the antiviolence space, emotion work may feel less like orchestrating that “fine background music” and more like conducting in the loud trenches of systemic and interpersonal violence. Wies (2011), in her ethnographic reflections as an anthropologist and antiviolence practitioner, describes multiple levels of “local suffering” within a single domestic violence organization's day: a “custody case gone awry,” an awareness of coworkers’ financial constraints, an absence of phone contact from a regular client, and an increase in shift hours due to “persistently understaffed and underfunded” workplace conditions (p. 4–5). Antiviolence workers are proximate not only to the details of victim-survivors’ legal cases or navigation of healthcare institutions; they also intimately see the material effects of perennially underpaid yet socially valuable labor in their colleagues’ financial precarity.

Alongside this “local suffering,” frontline workers must perform emotion work to generate empathy, to “authentically alleviat[e] pain, shame, and guilt […], to say to a woman, ‘It's not your fault’ and truly, sincerely believe that her actions did not cause the violence” (Wies, 2011, p. 5). Compounding this further—and knowing that victim-survivors enter and exit supportive services multiple times as they engage in leaving abusive partners (McFarlane et al., 2016)—not every client will respond to emotion work by accepting assistance or exiting a relationship immediately. Even if this is not an indication of improperly performed labor, “advocates likely experience a reduced sense of personal accomplishment when their clients refuse help or return to their abuser” (Babin et al., 2012, p. 150). After engaging in intense emotional exchanges with someone who may be a virtual stranger on their first meeting at an organization or someone whose life has become clearer upon multiple shelter visits, it is clear how these affective lows and feelings of helplessness can shape a street-level bureaucrat's relationships to workplace intimacies.

Integration of Private Life Into the Public

At various points during the COVID-19 pandemic, “safer at home” policies turned many service providers’ homes into a space of work. Street-level bureaucracies scattered beyond the walls of an office cubicle or public building, blurring boundaries between private and public space to the point where workers’ homes became integrated as a semipublic space (Kumar & Makarova, 2008; Miranda-Nieto & Boccagni, 2020). Unsurprisingly, this semipublic integration carries its own complex matrix of benefits and consequences for individual workers.

Sometimes work is desired to also be home, in the case of what Miranda-Nieto and Boccagni (2020) describe as a process of domestication, or “homemaking,” in the public sphere. In their research on Ecuadorian restaurants, the authors describe the methods that service workers use to make their restaurants reminiscent of “home” through decorations, layout, and menu and music choices. These more static artifacts end up colliding with individual aspects of private life—what is done “at home,” like restaurant owners’ children doing schoolwork at a nearby table—to become part of the materiality of a public space and evoke a shared experience. Miranda-Nieto and Boccagni (2020) frame this as emotional and intimate, as “the ongoing enactment of domesticity and a sense of familiarity in a foreign environment” can bridge feelings of difference for both clients and service workers (p. 1037).

In a different, though still affectively powerful, vein, domestication can also be used to transmit a casual, informal workplace culture by bringing certain elements of home into the shared office space. Casual can be fraught, as seen in the case of the tech industry, where startups intentionally crafted workspaces to be more like “home,” complete with free food, gaming stations, nap pods, and happy hour social events. When so many elements of home are at work, when “both work and play occur on the premises” (Wynn & Correll, 2018, p. 159), there is no need to leave promptly at the end of a workday for the private trappings of home—and there is more pressure to increase labor outputs by staying longer hours. Similarly, when elements of social “play” become compounded with workplace dynamics and authority structures, underrepresented employees may find themselves disadvantaged by this casual, homey atmosphere, like female employees in the alcohol-fueled, “fratty” culture of some tech startups (Mickey, 2019). Men might be able to let loose as they would in the comfort of their private home, but women must walk a fine line between capitalizing on informal social networking without appearing too familiar, flirtatious, and unprofessional.

Within the context of frontline workers under COVID-19, the intentionality of domestication becomes complicated—when work is home and home is work, what becomes semipublic space? If domestication “produce[s] a sense of home, as familiarity, intimacy and control” (Boccagni, 2017, cited in Miranda-Nieto & Boccagni 2020, p. 1025), then service providers may be in an uncomfortable position of attempting to cultivate a space of professionalism in a home that is, at times, beyond their control. For example, frontline workers may take Zoom meetings in home offices carefully constructed to reduce the appearance of “home,” or they may be without this space, left to share their private lives without a degree of distancing. Similarly, for service providers with children, their role as caretakers might become more visible and less controlled as children interrupt meetings with clients or coworkers. As well, the transition between work and home frequently involves the transition between two mental states with their own sets of habits and rituals (Broadbent, 2016). If workers cannot shut “off,” they may feel “on” even outside of work hours, denying an opportunity to decompress after a high-stress workday.

These boundaries between the public and private lives of frontline workers are further complicated by virtual communication, which removes physical barriers and geographic distance (Kumar & Makarova, 2008). Pre-COVID-19, all-staff meetings might require all employees to be in the same room at the same time. The predominance of Zoom meetings during the pandemic can make these moments of connection inescapable, even if distance and disconnection might be healthier for an individual's personal boundaries. As technology advances, we have more technologies of sociation, which “expand and intensify the domain of social connection” (Gergen, 2000, p. 136). These expansions allow us to bring private life into the public life and create more familiarity and sense of home in the public sphere (Miranda-Nieto & Boccagni, 2020). However, within the context of the workplace, we also must ask if this is desired by workers—and what obstacles that expansion may create for them.

Research Methods

This paper stems from our project on antiviolence service providers in the US Great Plains region. Antiviolence workers cross different job titles and roles but are robustly represented as frontline workers in previous research (Lindhorst & Padgett, 2005; Sweet, 2019; Wies, 2008, 2011). As noted earlier in the introduction, the discourse of the “pandemic within a pandemic” felt inescapable at times during COVID-19, and we were curious if frontline staff in antiviolence organizations would characterize this time of crisis similarly. Thus, we framed our project around one major research question: How are service providers navigating the actual work of antiviolence work—including client encounters, workplace routines, personal coping strategies, and broader perceptions of violent conditions—during COVID-19? We defined antiviolence work broadly to capture the largest range of frontline experiences: domestic violence, intimate partner violence, hate crimes, sexual assault, workplace safety, and human trafficking.

Defining the Sample

Using publicly accessible data to generate a sample of antiviolence organizations and organizational contacts, we recruited research participants in two states across the Great Plains. While some of this site selection was due to our own location within the region, Great Plains states also have high concentrations of rural counties that may be more susceptible to COVID-19 spread alongside fewer but still major urban hubs with transportation centers (Peters, 2020). Though the region is not politically homogeneous, six of the nine Great Plains states were led by Republican governors at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. Given the politicization of COVID-19, state leadership does play a part in mitigation strategies (Curley et al., 2021). In short, COVID-19 had many intersecting factors that shaped viral spread in this region and thus may have made the pandemic feel closer to residents in these states.

Upon gathering institutional review board approval (IRB-20-487) from our university, we began with an internet-based scan of publicly accessible repositories and lists of antiviolence shelters, nonprofits, and advocacy organizations. Our only requirement that was organizations needed to work in a direct, client-facing capacity—for example, if organizations exclusively lobbied for antiviolence legislation or offered educational programming, they were not included. We then compared our independently generated lists with results from state-level antiviolence coalitions, knowing that some antiviolence organizations might not be coalition members (and that some coalition members may not be readily accessible in online searches).

In total, we developed a list of 68 organizations. From there, we identified key stakeholders, the staff, and/or executive leadership who would serve as the first point of contact at each organization. Using either a publicly listed email address, phone number, or contact form, we emailed or called these stakeholders to gauge interest and schedule interviews. This process varied organization to organization—some potential participants circulated our request through internal listservs, while others redirected us to more appropriate contacts—leading to a great deal of snowball sampling. Even with the subtle variations in communication, we consistently asked these key stakeholders to direct us to full- and part-time staffers with some degree of frontline contact with victim-survivors.

From November 2020 to August 2021, we conducted 21 interviews with 23 service providers ⁴ across 12 antiviolence organizations. Taking a cue from what Low (2019) describes as pragmatic saturation, we found these interviews generated similar categories of responses, which we used in our qualitative coding strategies noted below. In essence, these 21 interviews told many of the same stories, even if the “n”-size may be contested in different qualitative approaches.

Interviews lasted between 23 and 72 min on Zoom or by telephone. Schwarz conducted all 21 interviews, with Welch observing two interviews in her role as a research assistant on the project. We used a semistructured interview protocol, which we shared via email in advance of our scheduled interview for transparency. This protocol included 11 questions that broadly addressed service providers’ self-identified pandemic-era challenges, shifts in routines, and suggestions for future work. We developed these questions with Taylor's (1998) nonhierarchical interviewing practices in mind, affording as much space as possible for participants “to elaborate on their experiences in order to allow the emergence of unanticipated issues” (p. 366). Neither Schwarz nor Welch have experience formally working in the antiviolence sector; we did not want our assumptions to shape how interviewees responded to our questions (or how they thought we wanted them to answer).

Demographics

At the end of each interview, participants answered a brief demographic survey orally or via email. For the purposes of this paper, we highlight two key demographic findings. First, all 23 service providers self-identified as female, which was unintentional in our sampling strategy. This is not to say that men or nonbinary people do not work in the antiviolence sector, but women make the majority of workers in this sector (Babin et al., 2012; Quinlan & Singh, 2020).

Second, we allowed participants to select as many answers as they saw fit and add in their own descriptions, which became particularly relevant when defining organizational roles. Participants primarily described their roles as counselors, forensic investigators, case managers, resource coordinators, and outreach workers. Though administrators and managers are not traditionally considered street-level bureaucrats (Lipsky, 2010), they are represented here, with 12 of the 23 service providers including some kind of executive leadership in their self-definition. While this may reflect a reality that antiviolence work requires more hands-on involvement among all levels of staff, this also hints at the financial constraints that require antiviolence organizations to do more with less—including doing the work of multiple roles under one formal job title. For example, two interviewees selected four organizational roles, the highest number of answers, even though their job titles only encapsulated one aspect of those roles.

Transcription and Analysis

Upon completing each interview, we uploaded the audio file to Otter.ai for transcription. We then read through the generated transcript for accuracy and errors, before deidentifying it and saving it to a secure server through our IRB-approved practices. Our qualitative coding practices remained intentionally open at this stage of our project, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic was ongoing (and is still ongoing as of this writing). We used a hybrid coding strategy (Fereday & Muir-Cochrane, 2006) that inductively scanned each transcript for major themes and deductively harnessed those themes around major areas of boundaries, intimacy, and proximity.

After we individually went through the data, we reflected on our categorization processes together in scheduled and unscheduled processes. In addition to regularly scheduled Zoom meetings (weekly or biweekly), we also engaged in immediate conversation outside of these scheduled meetings in the spirit of Linabary et al.'s (2021) informal “micro-practices” (p. 724). We found intercoder reliability by communicating over text messages and email or scheduling “emergency” Zoom meetings when our individual analyses became unwieldy; we went through particularly intense fragments of transcripts together to determine possible shared meanings. In many ways, we found our own work together mirroring service providers’ perspectives on the “new normal” of collaborating remotely (with sometimes intense immediacy) during COVID-19.

Findings

In the following sections, we trace street-level bureaucrats’ perspectives through thematic clusters on boundaries and intimacy. Each participant had something powerful to share within these clusters—be it reflections on work/life or public/private boundaries, workplace isolation, spontaneous collaboration, and client contact. But even when certain themes regularly emerged, the descriptions and value judgments placed onto them were not consistent. For example, when one antiviolence worker discussed their improved relationship toward work/life separation, another felt the public obligations of work increasingly creep into private spaces. This tension spread into our third thematic cluster on care and compliance monitoring, which blends the organizational separation of boundaries with the observational contact of intimacy. Though frontline workers may have felt ambivalent, even paternalistic, at times, they still noted an intentional effort to keep each other healthy and safe.

All quotes are cited verbatim, save for minor grammatical edits, and the deletion of repetitive phrases are indicated by bracketed ellipses. When citing our interview participants, we intentionally use the date of our interview in our citation. Because the conditions of COVID-19 were changing during our interview period—and continue to morph as we write—the date provides context as to what stage or “wave” of the pandemic under which each interviewee was living and working. For example, a service provider failing to reference vaccination strategies may not be indicating vaccine hesitant or hostile views; they simply may be reflecting the lack of vaccine availability at the time of our interview.

Boundaries: Work/Life and Public/Private Balance

According to our interviewees, one aspect of work that dramatically shifted under COVID-19 was the ability to balance work/public life and home/private life. However, this was not unidirectional; we saw this boundary fluctuate across service providers’ answers. One mental healthcare provider described how separating her public work life and private home life became much more difficult, as she lost the ability to practice her after-work rituals. This proved difficult for her, as the different environments of work and home—which engender their own set of rituals and habits (Broadbent, 2016)—were forced into one. As she explained, this change made it more challenging to leave her job upon day's end:

It's a lot harder for me to maintain good boundaries. So previous to COVID, I had some good rituals, you know, especially, like, the commute home […]. You leave at the same time, and you put […] your badge and your key card in your bag, and […] you listen to songs, you know, or things that kind of allow you to leave work at work. And by the time you get home, you’re ready to, like, set that aside and be present with your family […] There's no routine anymore. There is no commute. […] It's been a lot harder with COVID to do the work now. (interview 2/22/21)

Furthermore, this same interviewee elaborated on the role of technology's renewed presence in her life. Since her personal computer was also her work computer, she had trouble separating herself from work. This tangible reminder that “work is waiting” serves as another example of the blurring of public and private, especially when this emerges from the material construction of environment (Miranda-Nieto & Boccagni, 2020). The home office not only creates a greater sense of familiarity in the workspace but also demonstrates how public life can intrude upon the private to make home feel less like home:

I’m really bad at, for instance, like leaving my work email up at the end of the day on my computer and just not closing it out. Like, I walk away, done for the day, but I leave it up. Well, then, when I walk to my computer an hour later to do something completely personal, it's just that reminder that work is waiting for me. […] If I were going into the office every day, that would never happen because work is at work and home is home. But here I am, surrounded by notes, and I’ve got a suitcase […] of charts […]. And so, it just feels like the heaviness of work also lives at home now. (interview 2/22/21)

When work is antiviolence work, service providers navigate intense, extreme client needs on a day-to-day basis; it is “not work that you can leave at the door or in the staff room: it follows you home” emotionally and sometimes physically (Ward et al., 2020, p. 89). Having the “heaviness”—including the ephemera of work, like notes and charts—coexist with the more neutral or positively charged elements of home may be disconcerting at best or increase the inescapability of workplace pressures at worst.

Importantly, these experiences were not uniformly shared. One advocate who worked primarily in shelter resource provision described how COVID-19 forced her to strengthen her boundaries. She recognized that she needed to prioritize aspects of her personal life to ensure a better work/life balance:

Surprisingly, that's where I would say that I have learned to […] actually separate myself, just giving myself that permission to be able to go home. […] Now, […] I can’t speak for every advocate, but I know that I’ve definitely gotten better about being able to not take calls after work so much, as opposed to pre-COVID. […] Actually, my boundaries were not as great. […] Going back to that workaholic […] mindset where we should be working all the time. So, I feel like with COVID happening, it really […] shifted my perspective on […] what I felt was a priority, or what I needed to make a priority at work and what I needed to make a priority at home. (interview 12/14/20)

We might understand this example as a demonstration against domestication. When work and home are intentionally blurred, calling back to the earlier descriptions of startup cultures (Wynn & Correll, 2018), individuals’ priorities for self-care and recovery might clash with organizational structures that seek to maximize productivity and stretch out “on-call” hours. Instead of seeing this as a problem with the system, it may be understood as a problem of the self—unwilling to be a “team player” or an active participant in elements of overwork. Here, this advocate highlights a moment where the “new normal” of COVID-19 offered a moment to reconsider what had been a standard operating procedure before the pandemic.

Boundaries: Workplace Physicality and Isolation

For some, work before COVID-19 was already isolating, and new parameters around social distancing only increased those feelings of distance, disconnection, and even sadness (Lipp & Johnson, 2022). One service provider, due to the unique role she held at her organization, was already separated from many of her coworkers in her office's floorplan. As she explained, the physical boundaries that shaped her work “at the desk” (Dubois, 2010, p. 3) only compounded during COVID-19: “When I come in, I’m in my office with the door shut. […] I have not done a lot of interacting with other coworkers” (interview 12/2/20). Similarly, a mental healthcare provider described how mitigation protocols imposed isolation: “When we’re in the office, the expectation is that you stay in your office, and your office door is closed at all times, and that you’re coming out into public spaces as little as possible” (interview 2/22/21).

For some, isolation led to a shift in how they imagined their own self-efficacy on the job. A forensic interviewer specifically noted how the effects of physicality and isolation were both real and perceived: “We’ve had a lot of workers talk about how the isolation has affected them. […] The way that they feel like they’re doing their job, that it's not as well as it used to be” (interview 11/19/20). She followed this by describing the increased support she and her organization offered to community partners who might be feeling the strain of isolation—but importantly, she did not share any empirical examples of how their work might be faltering. In fact, work might have been continuing as fine as possible; this forensic interviewer shared a powerful story of success at the end of our interview, where she and her team were able to provide rapid wraparound services to a young victim-survivor of child abuse. Even with mask protocols and the threat of potential COVID-19 exposure, she described this case as “a fantastic job of coming together and […] and maintaining what our core values are, and getting that work done despite all of these challenges […]. Despite all of our challenges, we were still able to do a successful investigation” (interview 11/19/20).

This tension between real and perceived effectiveness during isolation matters because of discretion. Frontline workers do not only bring organizational rules and standards to their client-facing work; they also bring themselves, their judgments, and their self-perceptions (Lipsky, 2010). If a service provider has a different view of their own self-efficacy, especially under what Brodkin (2021) describes as the “external shock” of COVID-19 on street-level organizations (p. 18) and pandemic-era distancing, their encounters with clients will change across a variety of contexts. Decreased self-efficacy might push some service providers to lean more on rule-following to grasp onto some control in the face of extremity or inequity (Portillo, 2010); conversely, using Keulemans’s (2021) recent survey of Dutch and Belgian tax auditors, others may engage in less rule-following due to a lack of self-confidence in understanding and applying normative frameworks. Similarly, Møller's (2021) public service participants disclosed how their “reduced situational knowledge made them insecure and in doubt about how to make the best professional judgement (and decision) in the encounter with families and citizens” (p. 97).

Importantly, none of the service providers we interviewed shared any doubts about COVID-19 transmission. They believed this social distancing was useful, protective, and undebatable. The challenges emerged from the side effects of this necessary public health policy. As we describe in more detail below, one of the most prominent challenges was the loss of informal or spontaneous modes of communication.

Intimacy: The “Watercooler” Chats

Frontline workers articulated difficulty in reaching a comfortable level of intimacy in the “correct,” appropriate contexts. We found that intimacy was desired in the workplace and thought of as a good thing—but only to a certain extent and within the “right” spaces. Community can be a core part of emotional support in high-stress workplaces (Korczynski, 2003); however, face-to-face, communal interactions became complicated due to social distancing and increased use of technology. Especially under organizational or local mask mandates, face-to-face interactions became difficult or even impossible, so establishing community through informal communication was often not an option for many service providers.

While we cannot claim these experiences are uniform, there seemed to be a theme of intimacy's desirability in informal settings, what we classify as “watercooler” chats:

One thing that has always helped me get through the work is […] when I could walk down the hall to the watercooler 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)

For this service provider, a key aspect of her emotional support for her job was tied to spontaneous, organic conversation in informal workspaces, like the watercooler. These moments of intimacy helped her protect herself from isolation and retraumatization. By adding this community aspect, as she later explained, her job felt less draining before COVID-19.

The isolated service provider quoted earlier, whose office layout prevented more “open-door” communication, reported that, although video calls through Zoom were an option for connection, they did not allow for the same informal communication that in-person meetings provided. Her coworkers were overburdened with their own routines and caseloads; unscheduled interactions felt beyond the scope of what was possible:

I have not done a lot of interacting with other coworkers. […] When I’ve been in and tried, they’re so swamped with what's going on that […] they often don’t have even just a few minutes to talk to me. […] So, there's Zoom connections, but it's not the same. When you’re on Zoom, you don’t, after the meeting's over, hang around and talk to your friends. (interview 12/2/20)

This lack of informal or casual communication at the end of meetings paired with an increased urgency of work under COVID-19 exacerbated the problem. Intimacy, which was already mediated by piles of work and client engagements, now faced the barrier of a screen, the scheduling requirements to reduce coworker contact in-office, and the general intensity of life under a pandemic.

A coordinator across several programs for youth echoed the shifts in communication with virtual meetings. Instead of “spur of the moment” strategizing in the shared, physical office space, as she explained, “This is more of me […] having to be more organized and keeping notes and having meetings or phone calls to go over staffing or things like that” (interview 11/24/20). Similarly, an advocate/manager reported that Zoom “makes it all just very formal. […]. Even though we may be in the same building, we’re not together at all” (interview 1/05/21). This level of organization and structure might be important for some frontline workers’ efficacy and boundaries, but these strategies also take real time, energy, and resources to schedule and document what might have been a 5-min conversation pre-COVID-19.

Obstacles to intimacy effected workers’ efficacy in more ways than one. In addition to losing emotional support from others, the loss of community in the workplace led to less problem-solving on behalf of clients. One case manager expressed solidarity with her coworkers when trying to find resources. She described that, when talking with her coworkers informally pre-COVID-19, “Sometimes they’ll have a workaround, they’ll be like, ‘Well, this random agency fits that very specifically, niche thing that your client needs. And your client happens to qualify […], so they’ll be really helpful in terms of actually solving whatever issue has come up” (interview 12/15/20). With social distancing and the virtual office, these random yet routine moments of collaboration felt restricted. As Maynard-Moody and Musheno (2003) explain, “relations with fellow street-level workers carry the security of familiarity and the expectation of mutual support” (p. 22). This case manager has come to expect the immediacy of her coworkers’ supportive brainstorming, but it is simply less spontaneously accessible during COVID-19, limiting her use of this tool in her client-facing repertoire.

A therapist described another flipside of this intimacy barrier, further showing how these dynamics are not fixed in place. While ultimately describing her experiences gaining deeper glimpses into her coworkers’ lives negatively, she also offered a more complicated perspective:

Things get rather personal, you know, you’re seeing people in their home. You are trying to have virtual calls and suddenly, […] family members or dogs or what have you come in. And you’re also kind of realizing other challenges that other people are facing. […] It kind of gives you a heavy heart to know that […] your coworkers are struggling with different things, where you don’t normally hear necessarily the ins and outs of people's day or people's situations right now. Between COVID and everything that's going on politically just in the country, you’re kind of getting to see people on a different level, which can be really beautiful in that you’re deepening those relationships and that vulnerability, but also really challenging whenever you’re seeing people that do the work that you do every day, supporting other people that are really, really struggling. (interview 12/9/20)

Workers may desire some form of intimacy—the “right” amount that allows for a community to form, the “appropriate” amount disclosed in casual conversation—but not so much intimacy that they know all the vulnerable details of their coworkers’ lives without permission. This is where the nature of the COVID-19 pandemic truly complicates human interaction. By preventing face-to-face and informal interaction, COVID-19 workplace practices made the emotional burden of carrying the weight of the pandemic even more isolating. Workers could not readily access space where a strong community presence could thrive—or the space they could cultivate was dramatically restricted. Simultaneously, they were unintentionally sharing more of their lives with their coworkers or hearing about their coworkers’ lives, which may add to the burden of their work. Now, they were not only carrying the burden of their clients’ struggles but also their coworkers’ challenges to a different, taxing degree.

Intimacy: Frontline Workers’ Encounters With Clients

We also found powerful shifts in intimacy between workers and clients, depending upon the nature of their frontline position and its reliance on interpersonal cues or personalized responses (Garcia et al., 2022). In general, even with the shared knowledge that mask protocols were necessary and encouraged, our interview participants struggled with the loss of body language. One interviewee who dealt with counseling services as a regular requirement for her position described how masks and Zoom meetings created additional obstacles that she had to overcome in creating a “therapeutic connection” (interview 2/22/21). Similarly, a managerial staffer noted the challenges of reduced nonverbal cues in fostering connection: “Trying to connect with people and interact with people in a meaningful way when half of your face […] is covered up, that takes a lot of body language away. […] You can also see more of their emotions and issues when they’re not covered up” (interview 12/10/20).

For street-level bureaucrats, this loss is a dramatic omission in their repertoire of tools for negotiating client encounters, as “workers are constantly attentive to who their clients are, acting on their assessments of people's character and identity” (Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2003, p. 13). The “emotions and issues” that might be clearly identifiable—and easy to connect to certain outcomes, like the granting or withholding of certain resources—pre-COVID-19 might become muddled or less discernable from behind a mask or spaced 6 ft away.

The founder of an antiviolence organization focused specifically on serving, in her words, the Latino community—who, even though she technically held a more administrative title, engaged intensively in client-facing work—provided the only example of identity-based assessment shifts in our study. In her experiences, she found that COVID-19 protocols impeded her ability to be culturally responsive, which included cultivating trust through specific practices:

And being culturally specific, you build that trust in that first meeting. And so, in our community, it's very important for you to greet, to say, “Good morning,” calling them señor, señora, offering a drink, coffee. It's […] a key thing. They feel comfortable, they’re able to share more. So not being able to provide those culturally specific things that are also trauma-informed. In the beginning, […] we were scared, like, “Are we going to connect? Our community doesn’t trust, so are they going to trust us? Are they going to feel like we’re helping them?” […] But thankfully, […] we haven’t had a bad report to where it's like we are not helping. (interview 11/25/20)

The members of the community she served already had a distrust of certain institutions due to racism and xenophobia; generating goodwill and rapport was necessary to ameliorate that real concern. Even though she had not yet received any “bad report,” as with the forensic interviewer quoted earlier, the perception of difficulty was enough to cause increased stress.

Service providers who encountered youth in their work also noted unique challenges with intimacy, both in terms of restrictions and increased access. A forensic interviewer who worked with victim-survivors of child abuse had to conduct her interviews in a COVID-19-safe, though socially distanced, space, adding literal layers between herself and her clients:

So, in the forensic interview room, now it's completely set up so that [sneeze] shield is between the child and I. It's something that I have to address immediately when we come into the room. […] And most of these kids probably haven’t been in a forensic interview before, so it's not something where they would know any different yet. But having to talk about that, and then allowing them to freely choose whether they want to keep a mask on or not in the room. Just because there's so much facial expression, and some kids talk really, really soft. And so, being able to look at mouths and see those expressions is really important for me as an interviewer. But I allow the child to decide whether that's something that they feel comfortable doing or not. (interview 11/19/20)

In such an affectively charged context, the sneeze shield and mask may inhibit certain forms of connection or disrupt the flow of an interview. Interrupting a child to ask them to speak louder over a mask, even if asked gently, could feel upsetting. Similarly, at the time this interview was conducted, the COVID-19 vaccine rollout had not yet begun, and mask protocols were widely implemented in public spaces. The fear of unmasking and somehow risking COVID-19 infection—compounded with the anxiety of speaking to a masked adult about harmful experiences—might have shaped the forensic interview context.

At the same time, this frontline worker highlighted a discretionary affordance—what Renov et al. (2022) would call one of several creative “modifications to the investigation process” (p. 4)—that could create a new moment for intimacy: opening space for children to exercise their autonomy by choosing to wear a mask or not. For youth who may have found their agency and decision-making compromised through their experiences with violence, this moment of honoring choice could generate more goodwill and intimacy between them and this frontline worker. In a later interview, this forensic interviewer's coworker, an advocate who helped families coming in for services, explicitly stated this mask choice policy improved youths’ mood during these intense interviews: “Whenever they talk to the forensic interviewer, there's a divider in there, and so they get to take that mask off. And they really enjoy that, that they get to take it off and freely talk without that mask on, too, so that's pretty cool” (interview 1/4/21).

In a similarly complex vein, a shelter worker explained that extended stays created an opportunity for increased intimacy, as her organization would now see clients daily for sometimes 4 or 5 months, as opposed to the pre-COVID-19 maximum of 30 days:

It's probably the kids. Gonna make me cry. When they stay so long, they don’t know that we have boundaries, you know, they just know that they can come and get a hug from us when they need it. Or they color us a picture or whatever. And so, we develop fairly strong relationships with kids that are here for four or five months. You know, [when] you have a kid that's here for 30 days, and they leave, it's a little bit easier. […] I have one mom. […] She got a good job. And I’m really proud of her. And she has four little girls. And every time she calls just to talk to us and tell us how she's doing, all the little girls are in the background. “Tell [her] hi! Tell [her] hi!” And it's just like, you know, that's something that doesn’t happen before COVID. […] We still worry about the kids. But they weren’t here that long. (interview 2/22/21)

While the earlier framings of intimacy barriers were described as almost an inherently negative experience, this shelter worker's framing of decreased barriers was described as being more bittersweet. While frontline workers sometimes enjoyed the closeness and personal relationships formed between themselves and, for example, the children living at an organization's shelter, they also recognized that it made their job more difficult, as they became less able to establish protective boundaries between themselves and their work.

Care and Compliance Monitoring

Across all levels of workplace authority and direct contact, frontline workers shared examples of monitoring strategies, practices, or indirect methods that could be imagined as a “softer” surveillance. They mobilized these tools in service of care, to make sure coworkers were staying physically and mentally healthy during the pandemic. As with almost all our findings, this was not consistently described as a positive or negative feature of life under COVID-19 but framed as a fraught, complex practice—especially when encouraging compliance felt increasingly surveillant or reflective of challenging power dynamics.

For example, one managerial staffer explained how her antiviolence organization's health practices to reduce COVID-19 transmission affected how she engaged with her coworkers upon entering the office:

I would say at least three times a week when I go in, I’ll go and check in on them and say, “Oh, are you washing your hands?” You know, like I felt like a mommy dealing with children. “Are you washing your hands? Make sure you have your mask up over your nose. […] Make sure you’re using your hand sanitizer if you can’t get to a sink to wash your hands.” Which is, you know, it's a caring thing to say and do. But it's also, […] it's like being a parent at work, […] and that's not necessarily okay, but it's needed right now. […] Because, heck, in our job, half the time people don’t even get up and go to the bathroom when they need to go to the bathroom, much less get up and wash their hands, you know? […] Or eat. […] They get so caught up with clients and stuff, […] they don’t take the time to do that. (interview 12/10/20)

In this antiviolence office, work was already so fast-paced that service providers ignored their own bodily needs and concerns to offer assistance to clients. Under COVID-19, personal hygiene cannot be ignored, yet it also becomes one of many routines added to a daily agenda that might get compromised or fall to the wayside when client needs become extreme.

This administrator also highlighted tensions between care and compliance monitoring—being a “mommy dealing with children” is a potent description between the legitimate care for coworkers’ health and the gendered surveillance of “homemaking” at work (Miranda-Nieto & Boccagni, 2020). The relationship dynamic here is one between a manager and a frontline worker, not a parent and child, yet these reminders of personal care tipped her work into a more ambivalently maternal category.

Mental health was mentioned as a point of concern, especially for those whose work included both client-facing and coworker-facing tasks. A forensic interview who also managed parts of her smaller office shared that increased positive COVID-19 tests at her workplace required her to increasingly “just mak[e] sure my staff is healthy mentally, physically all of that,” which became “kind of a challenge” as more coworkers fell ill (interview 11/24/20).

An advocate/manager combined the ambivalence of increased surveillance with the focus on mental health in her description of shifting obligations at the start of the COVID-19 crisis:

I have spent the better part of COVID being a support for staff. And so that's probably why I’m feeling really heavy and like, pretty exhausted, honestly, at this point […]. So my supervisor and I were like, “Okay, we’re gonna just start having these Zoom all-staff [meetings], and I was like, “You know what? Instead of focusing on […] client rights or something, […] since this is COVID and this is scary, let's just do something light.” […] I did some type of trivia. And the staff were like, “We want to do this every week.” I’m like, “Oh, my God.” So, it's like, well, shit, but also how lovely. […] So, what I saw my role for a long time was, like, really helping set the tone of like, let's normalize feeling like super scared and weird and depressed and anxious. (interview 1/05/21)

This advocate/manager highlighted the push-and-pull between the strain of increased programming focused on mental health—the lightness of scheduled trivia nights—on her own workload with the top-down desire from her CEO to maintain this programming and the positive affirmation her coworkers shared. She may have created what Korczynski (2003) would call a community of coping, a “strong informal workgroup culture” to navigate emotional challenges (p. 59), but it was at the own expense of her emotional reserves. These processes of observing coworkers’ feelings and mirroring back a normalization of these valid mental health concerns, especially when layered atop pandemic-era crises, can exhaust frontline workers.

In rarer instances, this degree of surveillance was turned inward on the self. A sexual assault advocate described a particular case that felt emblematic of working during the pandemic. Her advocacy routines to be present for a rape exam were disrupted by the risk of transmission between herself and a potentially COVID-19-positive client:

And so, I was asked about my personal comfort, you know, and I was I was given the option to be the advocate or not. […] And so, I had to make a decision […] whether to be the advocate for that. […] And as I weighed it, you know, I was like, “No, […] this is what I feel like I’m meant to do, this is what I’m here to do.” So, I just upped my protective gear, you know, N95 mask, did a little more research. […] And stayed away from my family for a period of time after, just to take an extra precaution. So that was definitely so different because in a normal situation, it would just be like a no-brainer. […] It was just so different having to sit down and think about what this could mean. […] They believe I’m most likely being exposed, they are not sure if this person is good to go, but they really, really need a rape exam. […] There's so much that we don’t know about COVID still, so I’m just really having to make that decision. And then I just felt, you know, it was just an instinct that I felt everything was okay. (interview 11/27/20)

As she carefully explained, the physical health risk for victim advocates pre-COVID-19 was virtually nonexistent; agreeing to emotionally support a victim-survivor through a rape examination was a “no-brainer.” With the pandemic, a new layer of self-surveillance emerged as part of her job duties. Her standard routines of being present in the room during the examination required the addition of personal protective equipment; her time in the private space of home after work had to be mediated to avoid potential transmission between family members.

While these practices maintained her physical health, we are curious about what remains unspoken: in this emotionally taxing work, what does it mean to have a potential COVID-19 exposure in the workplace follow you home (Quinlan & Singh, 2020)? This frontline worker felt a gut-level instinct that she was doing right by herself and her client, but another advocate may not feel that same affirmation in their choice. Similarly, this level of monitoring and investigation about COVID-19 best practices might be labor that some advocates can undertake—but what about the frontline workers the managerial staffer observes who put themselves behind their clients to the point of ignoring bodily cues? Knowing that workers’ bandwidths might be stretched between emergencies and crises, the ability to self-monitor against a COVID-19 infection may be a secondary or even tertiary concern.

Limitations

As with all projects that analyze ongoing crises, our findings here will always be constrained by and reflective of our time domain. Since we conducted our interviews between November 2020 and August 2021, we were working before critical pandemic interventions like broader vaccine accessibility and free COVID-19 tests distributed through the mail. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (2023b) pandemic timeline, which only tracks until July 8, 2022, our interview period started just as Moderna and Pfizer released their vaccine trial results and concluded with the Delta variant surge (n. pag.). Given shifting viral conditions, our interviews will always represent a snapshot in time.

We also interviewed some participants before discrepancies between federal, state-level, and local COVID-19 mitigation policies erupted even further into politicized, partisan “turf wars” (Bethea, 2020; Neuman, 2020). This is not to say that these tensions were invisible during our interviews. Rather, certain policies—like mask mandates for bus, subway, and plane travel—had not yet been legally struck down. There were some higher-level masking requirements people could point out to legitimize their organizational policies or personal choices. At the time of this writing, masking in public spaces has drastically reduced, even though only 16.4% of the US population is fully up to date on the booster series (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2023a), making COVID-19 transmission lessen but continue consistently in some regions. Though examples are few, there has been a meaningful presence of mask-related violence meeting the level of criminal legal prosecution, like the 2023 conviction of an antimask activist who assaulted a business owner in Oregon for her cookie shop's indoor mask policy (Bull, 2023). We can only speculate how this environment would shape how our interview participants would respond now, but future research can and should address the intersections of politicized violence, public health metrics, and antiviolence service provision.

Conclusion: What Will Antiviolence Work Be Post-COVID-19?

As our findings above demonstrate—and in alignment with similar studies (Garcia et al., 2022; Lipp & Johnson, 2022; Murugan et al. 2022; Renov et al., 2022; Shadik et al., 2023; Toros et al., 2023)—street-level bureaucrats in the antiviolence sector faced nearly identical pandemic-era challenges across regional and temporal contexts. We hesitate to think in terms of universality (and what that categorization might flatten) but want to emphasize the power of this similarity for solidarity. If service providers have faced comparable challenges, developed comparable workarounds, or confronted comparable feelings of overwhelm, then thinking about the future of antiviolence work can call for coalitions at the national and even transnational levels.

Further, there is not one consistent, uniform way that COVID-19 disrupted boundaries and intimacy for frontline antiviolence workers. This is unsurprising, as frontline work is human work, and interpersonal encounters are always contingent on some alchemy of extenuating circumstances. But the complexity of these findings felt stark for us—when one participant shared the success of pivoting to Zoom meetings, another might have named it as the worst part of her job. This tension is visible in what we can only describe as a push-and-pull between the necessary routines of frontline work and the “new normal” imposed by pandemic living that could potentially continue. In this way, our research compliments Møller's (2021) pandemic research on Danish police officers and social workers, who had their own complicated struggle between workplace satisfaction and dissatisfaction under COVID-19 safety orders.

Certain jobs made it more difficult to hold firm boundaries during COVID-19, like the shelter staffer spending more time with children at her organization. Some found a difficult time breaking barriers down, like service providers forced to navigate emotional disclosures while masked and distanced. Still others, like the advocate who challenged being “on-call” without end from her home office, found renewed sites of resistance in the “new normal” of remote work. Regardless of the position, the lack of consistent levels of control could potentially lead to increased worker dissatisfaction and burnout in a field that already has high rates of both (Babin et al., 2012). As one advocate/manager powerfully disclosed—echoing fellow service providers (Garcia et al., 2022; Lipp & Johnson, 2022; Murugan et al. 2022; Renov et al., 2022; Shadik et al., 2023; Toros et al., 2023)—“This is kind of like the lowest I’ve ever felt in this work. And watching my colleagues who are so passionate about this work as well, watching them leave, is just making it more isolating” (interview 1/05/21).

We end with this quote not to take a fatalistic or negative view of work post-COVID-19 but instead emphasize the real challenges that will linger in the months and years to come. Antiviolence workers are not alone in this low feeling. This loss of passion in the face of increased COVID-19 stressors calls upon the failures of the “frontline worker as hero” discourse placed onto healthcare professionals (Mohammed et al., 2021), teachers (Will, 2020), and, increasingly, those considered “essential” in retail and service sectors (Musheno et al., 2021). If these workers are superhuman in their abilities to navigate extremity and crisis, then they can handle whatever is thrown their way—without structural support or systemic change.

One way to think through the future of work post-COVID-19 is to reconsider how we think about work, home, and the boundaries between them. As our findings demonstrate, frontline workers feel more effective when they can exercise autonomy over their engagement in the semipublic space of the remote office, including how much they share of themselves with their clients and coworkers. And as Shadik et al. (2023) emphasize, “a hybrid schedule may be a way to demonstrate respect for staff and improve retention” (p. 11). What resources do service providers need to separate work from home? If, for example, frontline workers are offered a computer or tablet to take home and use exclusively for work, they may be better able to unplug from lingering work tasks, even if they are still conducting that work at home. Similarly, even with the ease of continued virtual communication and its reduced barriers to accessibility, some frontline workers mourned the loss of interpersonal connection without the mediation of a screen. Instead of a blanket policy that reduces workers’ autonomy by forcing everyone back in-person all at once, antiviolence organizations should see which meeting genres thrived in a virtual context—like coalition meetings that bridged large geographic distances—and which require some face-to-face element for collaboration or troubleshooting.

These may feel obvious to state, but, in the ever-defunded world of street-level bureaucracies, fiscal austerity at the state and federal levels often results in “resources [that] are chronically inadequate relative to the tasks workers are asked to perform” (Lipsky, 2010, p. 27). Antiviolence frontline workers already make do with less, even during a catastrophic pandemic. Instead of seeing COVID-19 as another crisis against which street-level bureaucracies must tighten their finances, we instead advocate boldly asking for more locally and globally. At a minimum, antiviolence organizations should be supported to continue pandemic-era resources for workers, such as “sick time, creating opportunities for social engagement, encouraging scheduling adaptations to allow for self-care, and recognizing advocates’ childcare needs” (Garcia et al., 2022, p. 898), resources that would benefit workers within and beyond this frontline sector. To equip service providers to make informed choices about their work/life boundaries and the levels of intimacy in which they engage, we must adequately equip them with the necessary resources to keep those spheres as separate as each individual worker—in the antiviolence sector and beyond—desires.