Understanding how social worker compassion fatigue and years of experience shape custodial decisions

Compassion fatigue (i.e., a worker's diminished ability to empathize with clients) is common among "helping workers" and can result in psychological detachment from clients as a coping mechanism.

In the present research, we explored the relationship between social workers' compassion fatigue and years of job experience on hypothetical child custody case judgments.

In two separate studies, individuals with experience working with children in child dependency court (predominantly social workers, Study 1: N = 173, Study 2: N = 119) were recruited on Amazon's Mechanical Turk and read a vignette depicting a mother attempting to regain custody.

Supporting hypotheses, compassion fatigue significantly mediated the relationship between increased years of social worker job experience on recommendations that a neglectful mother receive custody, Indirect Effect = .06, CIs [.026, .127] (Study 1). We also found preliminary support for our hypothesized theoretically derived serial path model, in which (a) social worker compassion fatigue predicts anticipated secondary traumatic stress associated with the child neglect case, B = .54, p =  .0001; (b) secondary traumatic stress predicts detachment from the neglected child, B = .27, p =  .0003; (c) detachment from the child predicts job efficacy cynicism B = .65, p <  .0001; and (d) job efficacy cynicism predicts decisions to allocate custody to the neglectful mother, B = .46, p =  .005 (Study 2).

Our research shows that compassion fatigue among social workers may change the lens through which they perceive cases of child abuse.