Originally published here.

Based on data taken from lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT+) youth and community workers, this article highlights the occupational stressors experienced by LGBT+ professionals who provide emotional support to service users and theorises the potential for vicarious victimisation to occur as a result. Research suggests that the emotional harms of ‘hate’ can indirectly victimise those with a shared identity as the primary victim, through emotional contagion. However, little research has been carried out on those who support victims of hate. I theorise that vicarious victimisation may occur where an individual, who shares the primary victim’s identity, takes on their experiences through a therapeutic relationship as a negative consequence of the emotional labour performed.

This article emerges from a hate crime project that explored lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT+) experiences of ‘hate’ in the North East of England. The focus of the project examined how LGBT+ people negotiate, navigate, and reconcile the identities for which they were victimised. The project explored anti-LGBT+ hate across three community sectors: voluntary (youth and community users and workers), education, and the police.

In this article, I highlight the experiences of youth and community workers who support victims of hate. This article explores the emotional burdens of working with victims of hate and seeks to develop a criminological understanding of the potential victimisation process one may vicariously experience when supporting an individual who has been directly victimised because of their identity (identity-based violence) while also sharing that identity. Using the case of LGBT+ individuals employed as voluntary sector youth and community workers, I examine the emotional tolls placed on service workers as a consequence of performing emotional labour while supporting service users who have experienced identity-based violence. I suggest that vicarious victimisation may occur as a negative consequence of this emotional labour.

Iganski’s (2001) seminal piece proposes that the harms caused by hate-motivated violence move beyond the initial (primary) victim, like a ripple effect: at first to the victim’s neighbourhood group (such as close LGBT+ friends, family members), then to the primary victim’s group beyond the neighbourhood (such as local LGBT+ community or ‘scene’), then to other communities beyond this (other LGBT+ communities and spaces that may be national, international, or online), and eventually into society’s norms and values. As Figure 1 demonstrates, these ripples of harm are messages of hostility sent, in terrorem, to those who share in the identity of the primary victim, letting them know that they are also targets (Perry and Alvi, 2011).

These contributions have largely been theoretically grounded within criminological inquiry. Recently, Paterson et al. (2018, 2019) have produced empirical data, which demonstrate that those who share the same identity as the primary victim experience similar, yet indirect, emotional harms as that victim. There has been little scrutiny, however, of how this takes place for those who support victims of hate. Iganski’s (2001) work, while a key foundational text to this article, utilises a generalist framework to theorise how hate events carry harm and victimise beyond the primary victims more generally. I propose that vicarious victimisation is an additional victimisation process that occurs in therapeutic occupations, when an individual, who shares the primary victim’s identity, takes on their experiences through a therapeutic relationship. I, therefore, analyse the data pre sented through the lens of emotional labour in order to advance Iganski’s (2001) waves of harm model. While findings presented in this article cannot be generalised, they yield such rich discussion on the emotional impact of supporting victims; it is of merit to contribute these to scholarly discourse.

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