Reducing Burnout Among Anti-Violence Workers

Trigger Warning: Sensitive Content

An average of 4,000 people contact the Illinois Domestic Violence Hotline for support and safety planning each month.

Administered by The Network: Advocating Against Domestic Violence, a consortium of local organizations dedicated to improving the lives of those impacted by gender-based violence, Hotline advocates are a critical lifeline, listening to the experiences of survivors and connecting community members with resources, including medical attention, emergency housing, counseling, and legal support.

“Unsurprisingly, helping people through traumatic and complex situations can have a profound impact on frontline workers’ own well-being,” said Connie Chau, a fourth-year PhD student in Northwestern's Technology and Social Behavior program. “We often think about how to best support the people who receive services, such as customers, patients, or clients, but it is just as important to support those who provide these services and put their own health, safety, and well-being at risk while doing so.”

A particularly pressing challenge is secondary trauma — a reaction caused by the indirect exposure to (or helping other people who experience) trauma and violence. Secondary trauma manifests through symptoms that mirror post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and can result in high rates of burnout and turnover in survivor-centered frontline work.

Chau aims to help the helpers.

Alongside advocates from The Network, Chau is building a just-in-time adaptive intervention (JITAI) tool to identify when frontline workers supporting survivors of gender-based violence experience secondary trauma. The tool will provide coping support and recommendations to help alleviate symptoms and reduce feelings of burnout.

Chau presented this work at the 27th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, held November 9 – 13 in San José, Costa Rica. The paper, titled “Envisioning the Future of Burnout Support: Understanding Frontline Workers’ Experiences in Nonprofit Gender-Based Violence Organizations,” is co-authored by Chau’s adviser, Maia Jacobs, assistant professor of computer science at Northwestern Engineering and assistant professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine; Hannah Studd, media, technology, and society PhD candidate; Kaylee Kruzan, research assistant professor in preventive medicine at Feinberg; Colleen Norton, The Network’s director of special projects; and Denise Huang, ThreeSixty Journalism’s engagement manager and former community engagement lead at KAN-WIN.

Committed to community-based participatory research methods, the team has engaged local anti-violence workers in the development process from the outset. Through a series of group-based co-design workshops and a field study, Chau and her team explored the lived experiences of frontline workers and their perceptions of burnout, community support infrastructure, and technology.

“This approach helps us better align the research with the realities of their work and their needs, values, and hopes for support,” Chau said. “It enables us to collaboratively imagine how technology can exist in their spaces and build trust and investment through co-development.”

The tool will feature two key functionalities: adaptive, contextually aware support and peer interactions. JITAIs are meant to flexibly respond to the changing needs and circumstances of the individual user. By tracking and modeling an individual worker’s personal secondary trauma and burnout experience, Chau explained, the JITAI can provide support in real-time.

Chau notes that social support from empathetic supervisors and coworkers, as well as a sense of community, are crucial to how workers cope with burnout and secondary trauma. The technology is therefore being designed to amplify these important relationships through the recommendation of collaborative coping and support behaviors.

“Human connection is something that cannot be replaced by technology, especially when it comes to their difficult, emotionally intensive work, so our tool helps encourage these meaningful interpersonal relationships,” Chau said.

Looking ahead, Chau is designing and testing an initial prototype of the JITAI while leading a longitudinal study to collect data on how burnout, secondary trauma, and coping strategies change over time. She plans to organize a community advisory board with The Network to encourage frontline workers to provide ongoing feedback, contribute ideas or features, test prototypes, and guide the overall research plan. This dovetails with Chau’s related work in computing ethics and a project examining how academia can improve long-term transparency, communication, feedback, and equitable collaboration with local community members.

In addition, Chau aims to make an impact beyond her own field of practice in technology by collaborating directly with members of the anti-violence community and engaging a broader network of healthcare practitioners and policymakers in addressing anti-violence work.

Beyond the JITAI research, Chau also works with The Network’s Centralized Training Institute to provide professional domestic violence prevention and intervention training. She and Meher Rehman, The Network’s director of capacity building, are working to improve the community's understanding and response to technology-facilitated abuse (TFA). This controlling behavior uses technology to harass, threaten, coerce, monitor, exploit, or violate individuals. After completing the 40-hour certificate training required by the Illinois Domestic Violence Act, Chau has facilitated several TFA trainings in the past two years that have reached more than 350 anti-violence workers nationwide and continues to build Chicago’s capacity to address TFA and support survivors.

Chau and Rehman are also advocating for better working conditions for anti-violence workers through the We Deserve Better Project, a community of anti-violence workers nationwide that aims to improve and center workers’ health and working conditions.