What Does Trauma-Informed Care Do? a Critical Discourse Analysis of Tic In Social Work

Background and Purpose

Trauma-informed care (TIC) has become a dominant framework across social work education, research, and practice, and is widely promoted as a best-practice response to pervasive trauma. However, there is limited empirical evidence supporting TIC’s widespread adoption and ongoing conceptual ambiguity. Additionally, critical scholarship highlights concerns with how trauma, as articulated through TIC, is framed, including: a strong emphasis on individual and interpersonal harms, comparatively less attention to structural and systemic sources of trauma, and concerns that the trauma discourse may inadvertently pathologize already marginalized populations. This study extends ongoing critical examinations of how trauma as a concept is mobilized and institutionalized within professional contexts and the broader cultural milieu by focusing specifically on TIC in social work. Specifically, we examine how TIC as a concept is mobilized and institutionalized within the social work literature. Rather than asking what TIC is, we ask: what does TIC do in social work?

Methods

Our study utilized Gee's (2014) framework for critical discourse analysis. Our data consisted of the ten most widely cited social work articles on TIC identified through a prior scoping review of 131 peer-reviewed publications published between 2012 and 2022. We followed a systematic multi-phase analysis process, with each phase grounded in Gee's framework. Each author independently analyzed texts, produced analytic memos, and conducted cross-document thematic analysis to identify recurring discursive patterns. Specifically, we examined how TIC constructs identities, legitimates knowledge and action, and produces normative expectations around trauma and care.

Results

We identified two major discursive formations. First, TIC constructs client and provider subjectivities in tandem and in paradox: traumatized clients are simultaneously universalized (trauma is everywhere) and othered (traumatized people are marked as abnormal, fragile, and potentially dangerous), while professionals are positioned as benevolent experts whose authority depends on, and is reinforced by, the very vulnerability and dangerousness ascribed to clients. This dialectical construction reproduces hierarchical helping relationships despite TIC's stated commitments to empowerment and collaboration. Second, TIC operates as a technology of neoliberal governance: for clients, by targeting behavioral compliance and emotional self-regulation; for providers, by locating responsibility for burnout and institutional stress in individual self-care practices. Together, these discursive moves manage conduct while leaving the structural and institutional sources of harm, including social service systems themselves, largely unexamined and unchallenged.

Conclusions and Implications

Our analysis suggests that TIC is not merely a framework for responding to trauma but a regulatory discourse that reinforces individualizing and reformist logics. Although often presented as an organizational transformation, TIC's discourse organizes care through individual adaptation and self-management, functioning as a mechanism of neoliberal governance that obscures structural sources of harm. Critically, because TIC disproportionately constructs women, youth, and racialized individuals as sites of damage and vulnerability, its governing functions are not neutral. Rather, they concentrate surveillance and intervention on populations already subject to structural harm. Critical engagement with TIC discourse, rather than indiscriminate implementation, is necessary for social work research, practice, and education to remain accountable to its commitments to racial equity and social justice.