EMBRACE – Experience of secondary trauma in Child Protection Service specialists: An analysis of risk and protective factors, S-MIP-25-93

Project No. S-MIP-25-93
Project title: „Experience of secondary trauma in Child Protection Service specialists: An analysis of risk and protective factors”.
Project duration: from 2025-11-03 to 2028-10-31
Project manager: Dr. Aistė Bakaitytė-Bagdonė

Project summary: Secondary trauma poses significant risks to child protection specialists who face unique occupational hazards including regular exposure to child maltreatment. Despite this population’s elevated vulnerability, research on secondary trauma has predominantly focused on general healthcare and social workers, leaving critical gaps in understanding how adverse childhood experiences, emotion regulation difficulties,and barriers to self-care contribute to secondary trauma development, as well as how protective factors like resilience, social support, and self-care practices may mitigate these risks. This study will be the first to comprehensively examine the interplay between personal history,emotional capacities, organizational barriers, and protective resources in predicting secondary trauma trajectories among child protection specialists using a three-wave longitudinal design for over 1,5 years. The research aims to analyze risk and protective factors of secondary trauma through three objectives: (1) examining associations between secondary trauma and identified risk and protective factors, (2)investigating how these factors predict changes in secondary trauma over 6 months, and (3) exploring the role of risk and protective factors in secondary trauma development over the 1,5 years. Findings will help to gain new scientific knowledge and inform evidence-based prevention and intervention strategies specifically tailored for child protection specialists, potentially reducing high turnover rates while improving both worker well-being and service quality for vulnerable children, with broader implications for organizational policies, training programs, and support systems in child protection services.

 

The project is carried out under the Lithuanian Research Council’s activity “Research Group Projects”.