Caring states? Bureaucratic care,moral ideals and emotional dilemmas in British asylum and policing

Abstract

This article explores everyday discourses of care among public protection police officers and asylum-screening officers in Britain. Contemporary policy rhetoric of vulnerability and care commits these bureaucracies to relieve human suffering. Through ethnographic observations and interviews, this article reveals the conflicting and profoundly moral meanings that these officials attach to care, which they claim as a central inspiration and ideal of their labour. Officers invoke ideals of empathy, personalization and moral responsibility to navigate their roles – an attempt to redress what they characterize as a failing system and articulate their own aspirations about the state. Yet the gatekeeping and exclusion characteristic of bureaucracy undermines such ideals, bringing officials to confront the impossibility of their aspirations. Examining the moral tensions that ensue enables a reappraisal of dominant analyses of state power. Casting care as neither a unitary governmental logic nor a vehicle to legitimize punishment, this article redresses criminology's neglect of the ‘benevolent’ side of the state and illustrates the state's fragmented character.

Introduction

In The Culture of Control, David Garland (2001) depicted the contemporary states in the United States and United Kingdom (UK) as uncaring and punitive, in contrast to their welfarist predecessors. Despite its interventionist and totalizing tendencies, Garland characterized the post-war welfarist state as a key anchor of social solidarity. ¹ This nostalgic social democratic image of the caring state that became calculative and callous pervades much of the social sciences, which have been rightly concerned about documenting the human and social wreckage that resulted from the withering away and outsourcing of social protections and the strengthening of the iron fist of the state under neoliberal conditions (Wacquant, 2009).

In recent years, however, several scholars have complicated this picture. Drawing on Foucault's work on biopolitics, Agamben's state of exception and feminist theory on the ethics of care, they suggest that we are witnessing a new form of governance that appeals to ethical or moral sentiment, or the moral imperative to relieve suffering and save lives. This form of governance, that Didier Fassin calls ‘humanitarian governance’ (2012) and Miriam Ticktin frames as ‘regimes of care’ (2011), places benevolence and compassion at the heart of contemporary political life. It is a politics of precarious life that, according to Ticktin (2011), connects the human as a ‘biological object’ and ‘morally legitimate suffering body’, and sanctions exceptional forms of care (Feldman and Ticktin, 2010). These authors trace the contemporary rise of humanitarian governance to the failure of modern states to alleviate the tragic condition of modernity (Fassin, 2012). This scholarship on humanitarianism offers an important qualification to portrayals of the punitive state: it sheds light on the state's morally fragmented and contradictory nature.

This article advances such critical enquiries by focusing on the humanitarian facet of the contemporary British state, suggesting that humanitarianism has significant implications for state power, which go beyond straightforwardly offering a moral justification for state power and thus the reproduction of ‘the state’. By examining the moral worlds of asylum-screening and police officers, we scrutinize how competing institutional demands to care for and control those constructed as ‘dangerous’ and ‘in danger’ are apprehended, redefined, enacted and interrogated. We are particularly interested in disentangling what bureaucrats’ discourses about their longings and desires reveal about ‘the state’, as a multifaceted, relational, fragmented and contradictory field (Hansen and Stepputat, 2001; Thelen et al., 2017).

The ‘need to help’ (Malkki, 2015) that these officers articulate reinscribes ‘an aesthetics of personal care to the workings of state processes’ which, as Martin Holbraad (2021: 123) explains, is not to say that these officers indeed realize those ideals. Instead, it is an aspirational, unattainable and personalized ideal of what state care should look like: ‘constitutively to care for everyone personally’ (Holbraad, 2021: 124, emphasis in original). The accounts of their work reveal tensions and paradoxes in the state's promise to be the ‘carer-in-chief’ (Holbraad, 2021). On the one hand, the depersonalized, neutral and impartial nature of state bureaucracies contrasts with the very idea of care as a personal, affective and contextual praxis; on the other hand, such claims to care necessitate gatekeeping, exclusion and control (Kiely and Warnock, 2023). Rather than interpreting them as performative or as practices of legitimation (Vega, 2018), these discourses indicate a moral aspiration about ‘the state’ (Cabot, 2021). Asserting a protective, personal, proximate, compassionate face of the state is for these officers, we argue, critical for reclaiming the possibility of its goodness, and with it perhaps their own goodness.

We conducted this enquiry in two British state bureaucracies: the police and the asylum office. These two institutions govern socially marginalized populations that historically have been the target of totalizing state intervention characterized by ‘ambivalent benevolence’ and retribution (Fernández-Kelly, 2015). Under contemporary conditions of revived zeal to control borders, institutional interdependence grew stronger (Aliverti, 2020b). Since the 2010s, their work has been increasingly framed in the language of safeguarding and care, a shift that has been consequential for front-line officers across the global north (Aliverti, 2020a; De Koning, 2017), albeit in unpredictable ways. Within policing, the safeguarding of vulnerable individuals – from abuse victims to drug couriers – has been appended to their security and punitive functions. This revitalized emphasis on care unfolds in a context of underfunded welfare services and a nostalgic ideal of the police as proximate and personal (in the UK embodied by the ‘bobby on the beat’) amid increased depersonalization and delegitimation of the police. In the asylum context, the opposite dynamic can be observed. Traditionally understood as a bulwark of humanitarianism, asylum justice has increasingly been weaponized as a means of social exclusion. For decades now in the UK, the asylum office has struggled to deliver quality, timely decisions and faces systematic criticisms for failing to show compassion and prevent abuse.

The article takes seriously officers’ recurring claims to care across these two settings. State bureaucracies have long been characterized by their tendency towards depersonalization and a pursuit of efficiency and rationality, which erodes ethical judgements and fosters moral indifference (Herzfeld, 1992). Our ethnographic data, however, highlight that UK policing and asylum workers claim that ‘care’ is a central, although not straightforward, ideal at the heart of their labour, embracing the need to personalize institutional processes and relate on a human level to their clientele.

The renewed emphasis on care and safeguarding in criminal justice and asylum policy has been scarcely theorized in criminology. Despite the centrality of Foucault's influence in criminological work (Garland, 1997) and his insistence on care as a fundamental aspect of biopower (Redfield, 2012) – on which more below – criminology has generally neglected the state's benevolent side (cf. Newman, 2020; Thelen et al., 2017). When criminologists engage with this dimension, they tend to interpret it as another tool for discipline and legitimization of punishment. This interpretation misses an important facet of the state as embodied by street-level bureaucrats that demands further empirical and theoretical attention. Our study emphasizes that their claims to care represent a critique of the state ‘from within’ that does not simply legitimize punishment, but expresses the messiness and fragmentation of state bureaucracies writ large.

Why care? Why now?

Amid ongoing fiscal austerity and the slashing of welfare budgets to public services and local authorities, the UK has been engulfed in a ‘crisis of care’ (Bunting, 2020; Dowling, 2021). Successive Conservative governments mobilized this moral discourse to justify a wave of deficit reduction measures, pointing to New Labour's failure to ‘balance the books’ and a prevailing profligacy and dependence among the citizenry (Clarke and Newman, 2012). Meanwhile, opponents to austerity in the UK and elsewhere (Koch and James, 2022; Narotzky, 2016) deploy similar terms to challenge the failures of ‘the state’ to intervene in various forms of suffering imposed by inadequate public services. Such bureaucratic failures have been characterized as ‘malign neglect’ (Kiely and Warnock, 2023), and have heightened the emotional pressures for those at the coalface of British public services (James and Killick, 2012; Tawfic, 2022).

This elevation of care as a political ideal, in the context of ongoing budget cuts, complicates how front-line workers interpret and perform their everyday roles. At first glance, state rhetoric appears to align with insights of feminist scholarship that care is a relational, life-sustaining practice (Gilligan, 1982; Noddings, 1984), which responds to universal human vulnerability and interdependence and demands recognition as such (Tronto, 2010). Yet, as ethnographers suggest, care is an indeterminate category of human experience (Cook and Trundle, 2020), subject to negotiation, improvisation and the awareness especially in professional settings (Mckearney, 2020) where it is not possible to anticipate in advance of its enactment what it might look like. These scholars inform our approach, which interrogates the tendency to see the labour of public protection policing and asylum as necessarily a product or producer of either a politics of humanitarianism or punitivism.

The moral paradoxes of pursuing care evoke similar tensions to those that Michel Foucault (1982) identified in ‘pastoral power’. In Foucault's thought, pastoral power provides a premodern template for the power relations that evolve into modern governmentality (Martin and Waring, 2018). Both rely on individual-focused forms of (self-) discipline, detailed surveillance and a commitment of care for both the individual and the collective. Although their ends are comparable, they differ in scope: whereas the pastor seeks salvation in the next world for his flock, the modern state's goal is to ensure the well-being of its population in this one. For Foucault (1982), ‘salvation’ in modernity encompasses health, well-being, security and protection. Although rooted in Christianity, pastoral power has been absorbed and institutionalized by the modern state: ‘the Christian pastorate is…absolutely innovative in establishing a structure, a technique of, at once, power, investigation, self-examination, and the examination of others, by which a certain secret inner truth of the hidden soul, becomes the element through which the pastor's power is exercised’ (Foucault, 2009: 183). The modern state knows and intervenes in individual conduct, but in terms of populations rather than a spiritual flock. The soul is the focus of obedience to the pastor's personalized forms of moral instruction – with the moral goodness of the flock attributed as the pastor's own goodness, and any evil suffered by the flock likewise borne as his own (Foucault, 2009). In modernity, however, control over the body becomes central through rationalized, impersonal scientific techniques of population management, which comprise a larger apparatus (Foucault, 1995).

This less commonly cited aspect of Foucault's work enables us to reappraise dominant analyses of care and state power and focus on our interlocutors’ predicament, questioning the scholarship on humanitarianism where morality tends to be reduced to a political rationality (Fassin, 2012, 2015; Ticktin, 2011). As we will see, they find it impossible to meet the needs of every person as individuals. Despite their best intentions or official policy, they simply cannot care for one and all.

Methodology

This article draws together material from two separate case studies that were conducted as part of the Vulnerable State project at the University of Warwick. The first case study presents Simon Tawfic's fieldwork in a UK police force with detective teams who investigate allegations of sexual abuse and the criminal exploitation of children. A key part of their role is ‘safeguarding’, which encompasses securing alternative accommodation for victims and providing support independent of the criminal investigation. His fieldwork comprised 40 semi-structured interviews with detectives, staff officials, non-governmental organization and local authority workers of 40–70 minutes’ duration, as well as day-length periods of shadowing 2 to 3 days per week between September 2023 and April 2024, including attendance at multi-agency and case review meetings. Supplementing this focus on public protection, Simon also shadowed other policing teams, such as patrol and organized drug crime investigators, to situate public protection policing within the wider institutional setting.

The second case study, conducted by Ana Aliverti, covers two UK asylum intake units where Home Office staff hear asylum claims and conduct preliminary interviews with applicants. One was situated in a large metropolitan area and processed ‘in-country’ claims from individuals present in the UK. The other, located near a port of entry, dealt with people's claims on arrival in the UK. Fieldwork was conducted between September 2023 and March 2024. It involved ethnographic observations of the daily work of asylum officers, including of screening interviews and training sessions, and 45 semi-structured interviews with screening officers and managers. Interviews lasted between 30–90 minutes and covered participants’ professional background as well as the emotional dimensions of their work and the moral conflicts they face.

Having obtained institutional access, we recruited participants directly or through local managers, being mindful of their potential bias. Simon approached police participants directly, interviewing all available team members present in local offices during pre-arranged visits. Ana recruited asylum officers available during visits, informed by managerial advice on duty and shift schedules, and occasionally interviewed officers whose screenings she shadowed. Our group of participants reflected their team's distribution by gender, ethnicity and length of service. Two-thirds of the interviews were conducted face-to-face; the remainder were held via video call owing to travelling and scheduling limitations. All were recorded and transcribed, while ethnographic data was captured in written fieldnotes produced contemporaneously or shortly after observations. Data was analysed using NVivo software and manual methods. Throughout fieldwork, team meetings enabled discussion of emerging themes and synergies between the two case studies.

In bringing together these two case studies, we are inspired by scholars (Koch et al., 2024; Wissink and Oorschot, 2021) who demonstrate the analytic value of cutting across different governmental institutions, not least given the prevalence of multi-agency work. If ‘safeguarding is everyone's business’ (Department of Health, 2013: 1), as the 2010s-era policy rhetoric claims, then it is incumbent on our analyses to similarly track the work of care beyond institutional boundaries, revealing a broader panorama of its tensions and fraught conditions of (im)possibility. We also share with Navaro-Yashin (2002) the intention to trace the ‘faces of the state’ through its different instantiations and articulations, without confining our analysis to specific institutional settings.

Care at the front lines: Neither enforcement nor social work

Unlike Herzfeld (1992: 149), who famously claimed that ‘[b]laming the state (“the system”)’ represents an ‘ethical alibi of the heartless “system”’ which allows bureaucrats to displace blame for their apparently ‘callous neglect’ of suffering others (Herzfeld, 1992: 80), front-line officials from both institutions asserted a sense of individual duty, locating themselves as part of a failing system in crisis. Their invocations of ‘the system’ relayed their stated inspiration to reverse its failings and to highlight the need for care in their work, rather than as an attempt to excuse shortcomings. ‘The police have… failed people’, child protection official Frieda told Simon, specifying how ‘the system hasn’t been able to find what is right’ for ‘victims’ and that ‘letting people down’ ‘feels awful’. These burdens of the role prompt the feeling that ‘there are days when the job is “oh my god, this is horrific – I want [to be] out' and then you think ‘no, because who is going to fill my gap?”… What keeps me in [the] job [is that] we all care too much to be out of it'. Likewise, there was a general mood among asylum workers that the system was failing people seeking asylum. As Julia conveyed in a hypothetical conversation with an asylum applicant, ‘you think “oh well you are fine, you're going to the UK? Yes, you will be fine”, but actually it is the worst place you could be if you're seeking asylum because first of all, our organizations are faceless.’

Discourses of care featured prominently among those we interviewed and observed, even as its definition varied and was hard to pin down. Nonetheless, our interlocutors constructed approximate meanings of the term by distinguishing their work from stereotypical images of bureaucrats as insincere or self-interested office workers: ‘your heart needs to be in [your job]’, we both heard repeatedly. As asylum officer Shona put it: ‘a lot of people just apply for jobs because they want to earn money, but the kind of things we're dealing with, you need to have an empathy for the public – it is not just “dealing with them” – have some empathy, you know?’. Similarly, public protection officials suggested, their role demands specific moral attributes that palliate what Muir (1977) called ‘the dilemmas of coercion' by emphasizing the virtues of the police officer's character in the face of ethically challenging circumstances where officers may deploy force. Gillian cited ‘patience', ‘resilience' and ‘just being a good [and] approachable person' as necessary ‘personal traits', whereas her colleague Marcus listed ‘sheer honesty' and ‘self-deprecation'. These traits include a willingness to help others, seemingly unconditionally. For public protection sergeant Frank, ‘if a [colleague] pressed the emergency button now [a panic button on their police radio], a million police officers will run out of the police station, and they might not like that person but they will do everything they can to help them […] it is a nice feeling.’ For Frank's colleague, Marcus, this level of fellow-feeling applied to their clientele and was shared by partner institutions – charities and social services – who he characterized as ‘good people who literally want to try and save a life’.

The moral value of care was particularly articulated by front-line workers with welfare backgrounds – in education, health or social care – who had lost their previous job or had decided to search for a better paid, less-stressful role. Few asylum officers held an enforcement background, and most consciously distanced themselves from enforcement officers. For Simona, who joined asylum after acquiring a degree in human rights and working in the charity sector, ‘it would be like very against my morals to be working in something that is like … super on the enforcement side of things’. Others, like Jessica, changed teams when the new Illegal Migration Act 2024 shifted its orientation towards enforcement, evidenced by its change of name from ‘asylum intake unit’ to ‘illegal migration intake unit’. This new emphasis on criminalization was at odds with many workers’ professional profiles and original motivations for joining asylum. Officers with a welfare background in this division were also more likely to be women and ethnic minorities. They also spent long periods within the same rank, compared with colleagues with a conventional enforcement background – for example within Immigration Enforcement or the Border Force. Their professional trajectories show how care as devalued labour intersects with social inequalities (Laugier, 2016) to perpetuate a white, male and enforcement ethos even (or especially) within welfare-oriented institutions.

Amid the disorienting re-invention of their job roles – from processing asylum claims to arranging deportations – these officials aspired to ideals of ‘care’ to recover a stable sense of meaning in their work. Their labour – they emphasized – is to help the needy: victims of crime and genuine refugees. In this, they assume responsibility as ‘humanitarian gatekeepers’, assessing moral worth and deservingness:

It is a very … unique circumstance where you have to be this authoritarian, protector of the borders sort of role but actually you also have this ‘social work’ aspect of people coming in with deep, deep vulnerabilities … so you have that empathy and that duty of care to people…. But there is definitely the ‘social work’ and ‘police’ sort of balance that you have to weigh up and some people go more one way than the other. (Sonia, asylum officer)

Public protection police officials recognized a similar need to distance themselves from classic images of enforcement (Loftus, 2009). Since the mid-2010s vulnerability turn (NCA, 2019), such a distinction has deepened and is particularly apparent in the work of newly mainstreamed public protection teams and in more recognizable ‘law and order’ policing specialisms. The targets of both teams often intersect in cases of ‘criminal exploitation’ involving drug couriers. Nonetheless, the locus of inquiry in public protection policing is typically the identification and support of victims. Meanwhile, organized drug crime investigators frame their inquiries as ‘victimless’, emphasizing the identification of suspects. The moral attributes that characterize public protection policing were often drawn in direct contrast to their organized drug team counterparts. As public protection official Frieda remarked: ‘I love [the local organized drug crime team] … I just wish there was a sensitivity sometimes and an ability to look at the “bigger picture”’. Being within a team that focuses on vulnerability, she suggested, attunes her to the complex reasons ‘why’ people commit crime and therefore increases her hesitation to reach for easy answers, namely overcriminalization. This particularly applied for children involved in criminal exploitation. Such children, one official remarked, ‘have a level of trauma [which] completely skews their vision on what is right and wrong’.

Public protection policing and asylum officers embraced distinct ideals and approaches to embodying care and control. Their divergent perceptions of ‘social work’ highlight their contrasting beliefs about how best to communicate with vulnerable people. For asylum officers, like Sonia, invocations of ‘social work’ denote care and relational work. At the same time, this idealization of care-as-relationality is at odds with the primary objective of their role. In asylum, their encounter with clients is brief and often mediated by technology because asylum interviews are increasingly conducted via video conference. Even when conducted in person, interpretation over the phone is typically required. Before joining asylum, Felicity worked in the Job Centre office, allocating unemployment benefits and supporting claimants to find a job. She recalled how in that position she ‘was looking after and helping people throughout the process’. In the Home Office, by contrast, such involvement is impossible because the asylum process is increasingly compartmentalized and ‘it is not possible to get attached to anybody.’ Indeed, professional attachment is strongly discouraged, whereas depersonalization is institutionally favoured and even mandated (Gill, 2009).

Meanwhile, public protection officers frequently invoked ‘social workers’ in their reflections to refer to their professional counterparts in local authority child and family social services. Their invocation of ‘social workers’ depicts the figure of children's social workers as detached and authoritarian in direct contrast to the intimate relationality of public protection policing. When meeting children, one officer noted that she preferred ‘sitting on the floor’ with them, ‘just playing with the kids … it is just very unassuming, very relaxed [whereas] the social worker might be sitting on the sofa.’ For another public protection officer, the high rate of social worker attrition produced constant ‘change’ to the detriment of neglected children. To offset this moral shortfall in local authority care, she emphasized the importance of ‘being continuous’ by visiting such children repeatedly in an active, even obstinate pursuit of their attention and trust: ‘I might be annoying to them at first, but I keep going and keep going and eventually they talk to me more […] letting them know that you’re at the end of the phone’.

Officials in public protection policing and asylum, then, drew on discourses of care as a resource to assert the distinctiveness of their professional identities and to claim individual responsibility for redressing a failing system. These workers’ narratives suggest that the proper performance of care is – or at least, should be – a moral benchmark of the state. Images of a failing system, in short, represent a discursive resource for the desire to care. Asserting that they are neither enforcement officers nor social workers, our interlocutors sought to justify their roles by referring to the moral ideals that promise to set them apart: relationality, empathy and paying attention to the ‘bigger picture’. The following sections explore the everyday tensions and moral pains that our interlocutors encounter in pursuit of these ideals, revealing their responses to the pastoral dilemma of providing care to one and all.

Intensities and aesthetics of care in state bureaucracies: Between the defamilization and the re-familization of care

Everyday interactions between officials and their clients constitute a fraught ‘intimate’ sphere, shaped by fluctuating ideals of relatedness and common sociality. Herzfeld (1992: 12) argued that bureaucracies are symbolically underpinned by unifying metaphors such as blood, family and fraternity, which serve as ‘powerful emotive magnets […] deployed by officials and citizens’ to affirm and deny solidarity. For him, kinship is the ‘principal vehicle’ – ‘the bridge between body and polity’ – that drives people's imagination about the national community (Herzfeld, 1992: 76). Imagining their clients ‘as if’ they are kin – or actively refraining from doing so – featured centrally in our interlocutors’ emotional labour (Hochschild, 1983), requiring these officials to work actively on their spontaneous impulses of solidarity and suspicion. Such imaginative labour to simulate or deny kinship did not correspond to the presence or absence of care: both were forms of ‘deep acting’ (Hochschild, 1983) – cultivating within their ‘real’ selves the feelings they aspire to perform by calling upon emotion memory and self-persuasion – that claim care as its inspiration.

Our ethnographic comparison of UK asylum and public protection policing reveals contrasting trends in how kinship metaphors surface in officials’ renditions of bureaucratic care. These different orientations reflect entrenched ideas of deservingness that cast adult asylum seekers (as opposed to deprived children and young people) as inherently suspicious and insincere, where care has been progressively gatekept and reserved for the exceptional few (Ticktin, 2011). In asylum, ideals of care are commonly sanitized and corporatized through the mantra of ‘customer service’, offering an example of what Tronto calls the ‘defamilization’ of care (2010). Indeed, corporate language and practices have long been infused in the Home Office ‘business model’ built around subcontracting and outsourcing (Burnett and Chebe, 2019). Since 2022, asylum casework has expanded substantially to reduce the application backlog, involving the heightened recruitment of agency workers. This hiring spree, according to the department's watchdog, resulted in inadequate training and high levels of employee attrition (Neal, 2023). This context is important to understand how care ‘on the ground’ has been increasingly understood and enacted in the language of ‘customer service’. In his mid-20s, Sebastian joined the Home Office after working in retail since leaving school. He was recruited locally by an agency through an expedited process that did not require prior experience in asylum. When Ana asked what attracted him to asylum, he mentioned his ‘customer service’ experience: ‘how to deal with customers with different queries, understanding them, trying to solve their problems’. Queried about the different ‘clientele’ in this sector, Sebastian quickly qualified: he had to make some ‘adjustments to individual needs’ in this role, ‘not everyone is … all happy, you know. These people are escaping the country, they need more care’.

‘Customer service’ training is frequently delivered to asylum officers by their own peers. Its objectives are to ‘identify excellent customer service and understand the impact of your attitudes and behaviours on customers’. The 2-hour session that Ana observed was shortened to 45 minutes because of insufficient questions by the audience comprising only 10 attendees out of an office of around 100 screening staff. It began by presenting the organization's mission statement to staff, which nobody knew, that declared a commitment to treat people ‘with respect, dignity and fairness’ and to register their asylum ‘in a safe, secure and sensitive environment’. The session was organized around various exercises. As part of a role-play activity, the manager delivering the training assumed the position of an officer, purposefully wearing scruffy clothes and leaving the room abruptly when his phone rang. The trainer then asked his audience to spot the ‘poor customer service’. Attendees were also asked to remember the details of the last time we travelled on public transport and to answer questions about the children story of Goldilocks. The brief discussion that followed aimed to highlight the difficulties ‘customers’ faced in remembering details and the grey areas that exist in factual reality and accounts, inviting us ‘decision-makers’ to listen empathetically to the testimonies of traumatized applicants and to recognize the nuances involved in asylum casework. One of the inspectors in the room intervened to make the point hit home. She lectured staff about the need to be conscious of how they talk to ‘clients’, while idealizing distance: ‘you don’t need to give your name, just be courteous, say good morning’. As the session was quickly wrapped up, all the attendees put away their packed lunches and returned to their cubicles, fearing that ‘outside’ – the public-facing area where applicants wait for their interview appointments– will be ‘madness’ and a ‘jungle’. The abrupt change in the language to refer to ‘clients’ conveyed at once how depersonalization and racialization operate in reinforcing ways.

The session reflected the profound moral tensions about offering care within contemporary asylum bureaucracies (Haas, 2017). Primarily imagined and articulated through the corporate and detached language of customer service, care is presented as a core value while being devalued and overridden in the course of a session devoted precisely to train staff about ‘care’ owing to its brevity and laxity, as the small, pressurized audience return anxiously to their roles. One such tension – between imagining asylum applicants as identikit ‘customers’ or relatable individuals – was captured by Simona who felt that there is ‘an expectation’ that staff should be empathetic to people, especially if they are young families or children. Yet with ‘the numbers of the people we get, it becomes difficult to really pay attention to individual people and their own needs’. For her colleague Lisa, it is not just about numbers. Bureaucratic care involves adopting an emotionally circumspect, ‘trained subjectivity’ towards applicants that is regarded as an indication of neutrality and objectivity, qualities deemed central for the role (Hertoghs, 2024): ‘you can be compassionate but not too compassionate… I am here to collect the information. I can’t make it personal… because it is the job and you’re helping them in a formal way to register their claim’. Care for her implied accuracy, impersonal treatment, moral distance, and efficiency – that is, care in general.

For public protection police officers, the ‘customer service’ mantra surfaced in interactions with suspects. For longstanding investigator Colin, ‘when you get them in the room’ for an interview, a suspect is ‘just another person’ with whom Colin described being able to ‘shut down quite easily’ the impression of his having ‘feelings’. ‘It comes down to your interviewing technique and the training you get’, he continued: ‘You are nice. And it pays to be nice, it pays to be polite, until […] you get to the challenge phase of an interview’.

Those who worked in victim-centred policing (particularly with children), by contrast, sought ‘to be genuine and show care’, because ‘kids [especially] sniff insincerity a mile away’ and would refrain from being open with officials. These officers must develop personalized forms of rapport with victims across an extensive period, contextualizing them within the familial sphere and managing their relationships; here, their labour idealizes a re-familizing form of care. Detectives commonly cited the importance of their own experiences of parenthood when evaluating the needs of potential child victims and deciding on interventions. Sergeant Constance reported that her work is ‘to try and build that relationship with your victims and help identify the most victims’, adding ‘being a parent of young kids, I think “well if that was my child, how would I want my child to be dealt with?”.’ Her colleague Marcus concurred: ‘I talk about my family a lot when I am talking to these kids [and] their parents, because that is what I am basing my decision making on’. In short, these officers idealized a model of their policing specialism that embraces ‘care duties usually associated with a loving family’ (Thelen et al., 2014: 117).

Longevity of relationships figured centrally in public protection officials’ ideals of care. Frieda reported that it was only after three years since first meeting a suspected exploitation victim that ‘he would share anything’; she continued that she would ‘much rather take the time to build a relationship where he knows that he can text or ring and say “this has happened, what do I do? Like what is the next steps”’. Envisioning herself as a ‘repair worker’ (Stuart, 2018), Frieda's ideal of intimacy seeks to make up for the lack of ‘strong home support’ which, for officers, predisposed such children to becoming the targets of exploitation. Public protection officials viewed ‘building bonds’ with victims as protective in and of itself – rather than solely for the purposes of gathering evidence – because it opened up the possibility of educating victims about exploitation and abuse.

Re-familization also relates to a particular aesthetic of care. Asylum officers claimed a similar sensitivity to the impact of their self-presentation on their ‘customers’, especially children, with whom they need to establish mutual trust. With children, the centrality of knowing through sensing (the visual and sensory cues) is even more acute (Cabot, 2014). ‘You can’t ask too many questions. You can’t challenge too much’, Faisal acquainted Ana on the sensibilities involved in interviewing asylum seeking children. ‘You need to know when to stop.’ Asylum officers echoed public protection police officials in observing that children are ‘difficult to protect’ so they insisted on the importance of not wearing uniforms and talking ‘at their same level’, while recognizing the obstacles that the securitized and cold architecture of police custody or asylum offices pose to building trust.

Embodying the state, our interlocutors suggested, demands a careful calibration of distance and proximity with ‘clients’, which in turn is animated by practical aims (such as securing evidence). The idealization of either distance or proximity is highly contingent upon the identity of clients and the moral judgements made upon them. Claims to care, in effect, underscore tensions at the heart of the state, which the last section explores further.

Between ‘the managed heart’ and ‘the porous heart’ of the bureaucratic self

The idealization of care in public protection policing and asylum casework comes with a set of conflicting ‘feeling rules’ (Hochschild, 1983) that both demand and discourage officials’ emotional entanglement in the suffering of their clientele. On the one hand – particularly in asylum – staff seek to remain distant, offering general, impersonal and impartial ‘customer service’: this is a familiar face of ‘the managed heart’ that wears a figurative mask and suppresses emotion (Hochschild, 1983). On the other hand – particularly in public protection policing – intimate emotional investment is a stated professional imperative that aspires for spontaneity and mutual trust with victims: a more ‘porous heart’. Front-line workers must learn to navigate these conflicting demands, and their reflections on these questions reveal tensions in what they believe ‘the state should be or do’ (Andreetta et al., 2022: 8, emphasis in original).

Empathizing with victims’ suffering – even to the point of compassion fatigue and feeling traumatized oneself – is both a prerequisite and marker of care, but the intersubjective nature of trauma consciously generates anxieties of self-endangerment as much as opportunities for intimate relational bonds. The role that traumatization plays in officials’ narratives echoes similar experiences by international humanitarian workers who collapse ‘compassion fatigue and vicarious traumatization’ and fear that trauma is harmfully contagious (Doering-White, 2022: 7). However, our analysis diverges from the claim that compassion fatigue is used to explain professionals’ failure (Taithe, 2019) or that officials straightforwardly detach and deny responsibility (Baillot et al., 2013). Instead, we suggest, our interlocutors’ moralization of trauma reveals their sense of tragic struggle between the inevitability of victims’ suffering and their belief in their personal capacity nonetheless to rescue them. The fact that their roles hinge precisely on their individualized enactments of care heightened this sense of pastoral responsibility and tragedy.

The proper emotional stance that asylum officers should adopt with applicants is usually learned through socialization ‘on the job’. Learning what ‘care’ looks like in a highly pressurized and politicized setting demands a process of readjustment: balancing detachment, empathy and professionalism is the product of experience, they reported. Several interlocutors indeed distanced themselves from ‘civilians’ and new recruits, who they viewed as too emotional and ill-equipped to deal with traumatized populations. A corporate secretary turned public sector worker, Esther confessed to having difficulties with her asylum post at the beginning:

When I first started, […] I thought that every case was genuine and that all these people [who sat] in front of me like had these, like, terrible things happening to them. […] However, having worked where I have worked before (like I’ve seen it at the Job Centre, I’ve seen it in the prison), I did have a level of being able to keep it at work and not let it affect me personally […] So now it doesn’t affect me.

This ability to disengage, sociologists of occupations indicated, forms part of the work of producing ‘ordinariness’ out of the abnormal in professions like nursing where death is ubiquitous (Chambliss, 1990). Learning this moral disposition is regarded as one of the milestones of ‘becoming’ an asylum officer and is engrained through informal professional rules (Baillot et al., 2013). Yet even Esther confessed ‘getting caught off guard’, as she put it – an excess of empathy that figuratively breaks from script by emerging unexpectedly and resisting suppression. Esther's professional trajectory from the private to the public sector was marked by her own caring responsibilities and personal circumstances. She described certain domestic violence cases ‘triggering’ because she had experienced it in her personal life. Esther recalled the case of a woman from the Philippines who had not initially disclosed episodes of violence by her husband towards her.

At first, she was very, like, didn’t even want to admit that it was happening. But as I started to talk to her a little bit more, I think it was the first time that she’d actually opened up… And I think because I have been for it myself – not that I told her that, but I think sometimes as a woman, like women's intuition – I think she can kind of tell. […] I did make a bit of an exception and I did let her just talk almost like a therapy session, which I probably shouldn’t have.

Notwithstanding fragmentation and rules of distance, Esther offered something akin to a form of individualized care – ‘let her just talk almost like a therapy session’. This approach was conditional and contingent on shared gendered identities and depended on truthfulness and spontaneous sincerity. In asylum work, the distinction between proximity and distance maps onto moral assessments of authenticity and deservingness. Applicants perceived to be ‘genuine’ are given time and space, in contrast to those who are not. Those applicants, Martha suggested, receive a more impersonal, distant and ‘bureaucratic’ care: ‘Before, I didn’t mind sitting there 45 minutes [doing a] referral because I knew that that was a genuine case. But when you’re spending that time doing it for somebody who is not genuine, it's frustrating. But obviously you still have to do a referral because I might have got it wrong, like, they might be a genuine person’.

In contrast to their counterparts in asylum, public protection detectives idealized emotional spontaneity and empathy with victims, viewing their role as mediating human trauma. ‘The way that we respond to some of those crises has a massive impact’, Frieda narrated, before describing a case in which she arrived to collect a potential victim of exploitation from his school only to realize that an attacker targeting the child was also waiting for him there, posing harm to the child and herself. She quipped ‘right, we’re bonded for life now’. Moreover, victims’ disclosures of trauma emerge from and sustain such relational bonds, according to these officials. Gillian narrated her efforts to salvage a relationship with a victim who felt that a prior investigation she worked on ‘failed’: ‘I remember saying to him “would I have the audacity to come to speak to you [again] if I hadn’t done everything I possibly could?”’. Appealing to ‘the fact that I had spoken to him previously as a way of trying to engage with him again’, she felt that this ‘helped’ the relationship, observing ‘when you’re pouring out all your trauma over interviews… you have that engagement with someone over a period of time… you’re going to get to know someone a bit, aren’t you?’ Gillian's appeal aimed to persuade him of her sincerity and, in turn, of her recognition of his emotional openness. Her reflections depict trauma's role as a relational currency – a token of trust offered to an individual official – in exchange of honesty.

Like asylum workers, public protection officials idealized an individualized working model where the same investigator maintains responsibility and interaction with victims. From Colin's perspective, 'seeing something from start to finish is unique in child abuse and I think that makes it better because you don't just hand it over to someone else and don't think about it. You have a personal investment in it from the start. […] You've got that responsibility from start to finish.' Such personal investment demands belief in the sincerity of victims' narratives of suffering, often bringing investigators into conscious conflict with the competing demand to evaluate whether the victims' testimony can evidentially offer ‘a realistic prospect of conviction'. ‘I am really emotional about this [and] it really drove my head mad', David remarked, when victim advocates claimed to him that the abuse ‘definitely happened; how can you not believe them?’.

This conception of care, then, idealized the porous figure of the good police officer as ‘contain[ing] the darkness in society, whilst keeping it [away] from us’ in the words of a chaplain writing in the Police Federation newsletter (Anonymous, 2024: 6). For Colin, this ideal of carrying victims’ suffering ‘get[s] to a point where your empathy sort of dries up. And that doesn’t mean that you don’t care, but you just come to a state of numbness about it and that's not really a good place to be.’ Meanwhile, supervisors recalled their experiences of witnessing suffering as formative to cultivating care. One sergeant narrated an experience earlier in his career of being alone on patrol late at night when he unexpectedly encountered a deceased person hanging from a tree in the forest after an apparent suicide. ‘It scared the shit out of me… it came back and gave me PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder], which I didn’t recognize then’, reflecting that this experience emphasized the need as a supervisor for ‘protecting my staff’ and making sure ‘they are looked after’. Moreover, he recounted how he would ‘take everything learned’ from responding to suicide cases particularly to help ‘the family’ of victims ‘transition through that trauma’, which is, he asserted, the most satisfying aspect of his role: ‘that's why I do the job – dealing with people in the worst time of their lives’. Relating his own experience of trauma to the putative trauma of his clientele, his reflections convey an ethic that recognizes a shared vulnerability to trauma that serves as an inspiration to care.

In effect, the fate of victim-centred public protection work (and to a lesser extent of asylum work) narrated here resembles Foucault's pastor, in which officers’ selves are entangled adversely with the fate of victims and made the subject of blame and anger precisely from those whom they seek to protect. ‘Care’, in these systems, signifies relationality, emotional involvement and proximity. It implies kinship and individualization. At the same time, it requires a standardised approach to clients, impartiality and, therefore, impersonal treatment. As asylum official Jessica put it, ‘you have to treat everybody the same [but], I find that difficult… because nothing could ever be that black or white.’ Ultimately, the will to care both demands proximity to others and creates ambivalence about them. Officials aspire to save lives, while recognising the futility of this endeavour.

Conclusion

Exploring discourses of care made by front-line staff working with marginalized groups sheds light on the analytic shortfalls of conceptualizing ‘the state’ through grand, homogenizing frameworks. Reifying the state as coherent and bounded, such analytical strategies impede a more nuanced understanding of how state power is exercised and unsettled through its everyday enactment. Attending to discourses of care articulated by these state officers complicates these totalizing theses, shifting our attention to how values and affects are integral to this exercise, which are in turn entangled with individual trajectories, occupational cultures and the ethical climate about the role of the state (Fassin, 2015).

An examination of care in these institutions brings into sharp focus a neglected facet of ‘the state’ by criminologists, who have seldom interrogated the ‘benevolent’ side of state power. When criminologists consider such matters, they tend to argue that care legitimizes punishment. As a result, they fail to engage in the deeply complex ethical dilemmas involved in exercising power, including coercive power, and distributing state-sanctioned pain and protection. In so doing, criminology has paid insufficient attention to the moral and emotional worlds of state officers, thus flattening out and explaining away nuances, contradictions and longings, just as the biographies of their clients are often simplified (Fernández-Kelly, 2015). The lack of serious engagement with these dilemmas prevents us from considering critical impulses from within the state and appreciating the claims to care as a praxis and ethics that are forged through personal encounters and reflexivity. This engagement is vital to reimagine the state through more humane forms of governance (Cooper et al., 2020) and to open novel avenues of enquiry in criminology that reconnect it to its social justice ambitions (Goddard et al., 2015).

By contrast, our research has found that appeals to ‘care’ condense the professional longings and anxieties of officers who work in institutions that place increasing emphasis on safeguarding and care amid structural restraints on welfare. In this context, discourses of care acquire distinct moral and affective contents and meanings. Reclaiming an ethics of care, these officers craft a professional identity to distance themselves from delegitimized others: they are neither law enforcers nor social workers. At the same time, in doing so, they work with divergent ideals of care. In asylum, allusions to care as ‘customer service’ fit the bureaucratized, dehumanized and corporatized ethos and politics of asylum. In public protection policing, officers subscribe to a strongly personalized and intimate ideal of care, revealed in the recurrent use of metaphors of familial relationships. Such differing occupational orientations, we have shown, are due to the divergences in how they imagine the identity of their ‘clients’, pointing to the relationality and conditionality of care.

Conditionality is evident in the recurrent references to children as idealized recipients of care. Essentialized as gullible and blameless, the figure of the child prompts exceptional, individualized dispositions and evokes fears of future moral decline (cf. Ticktin, 2017). Yet contrasting with Foucault's analysis of the pastorate where individual care works towards ‘salvation of the flock’ in general (Foucault, 1982), officers’ claims to care relied on individuation, particularization and moralization as a necessary condition of their predicament, rather than in the service of a shared collective goal. As such, their care resembles postmodern depoliticizing humanitarian rationalities more than their socio-democratic welfarist aspirations might suggest.

The conflicting ‘feelings rules’ in the different institutions, between managed and porous hearts, reveal broader tensions in what they believe ‘the state should be or do’. Ultimately, contrasting ideals of care articulate aspirations and longings – the relational figure of the ‘bobby on the beat’, for police officers, and the welfarist model of social work for asylum caseworkers. And yet, as we see it, attempts to reinstitute or adapt those figures bring them into confrontation with the impossibility of the ideal to provide individualized care to all. Attending to discourses of care among UK front-line officers, brings to the fore the moral dilemmas and the pains of embodying the state, demonstrating the importance of bringing questions of morality and emotions into the analysis of power.