What happened to you? Articulating the social injury of trauma.

Stewart, Hilary (2023) What happened to you? Articulating the social injury of trauma. In: UNSPECIFIED. (Unpublished)

Abstract

Trauma and Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are increasingly framed as a root cause of a wide range of dysfunction, disorder and disease, from criminal/anti-social behaviour & serious violence to cancer, substance use and poor mental health. As technoscience proliferates information on the far reach and long-term impact of trauma, it has been suggested that we are witnessing a Kuhnian paradigmatic shift in how we understand health, pathology and human nature (Bloom, 2016). In response to the crises of trauma, ‘ACE-aware’ and ‘trauma-informed approaches’ are being rolled out across services, however, largely represent individualised solutions to complex social problems. This paper critically explores the dominant portrayals of trauma and how these displace the central role of power in social suffering and poor life outcomes, suggesting that a language of social injury is missing from current articulations of trauma. If we are to respond to the existential cost and consequences of trauma associated with social position, interventions and approaches must mobilise critical vocabularies which connect trauma to the structurally violent and traumatogenic systems that produce trauma.