The trauma from within: When the workplace turns against an officer

Abstract

The examination of police officers’ interactions with co-workers, supervisors, managers, and other employees has established cases of institutional betrayal and sanctuary trauma within the Canadian policing community. There has been a tendency to classify and characterize these traumas independently despite them co-existing in singular or cumulative traumatic events. When the complexities and nuances of the culture of policing are considered, there is a need to define these experiences to better reflect this reality and suitably classify these traumas in a way that singularly encapsulates the dynamics of both sanctuary and institutional betrayal trauma. A singular classification will afford a more complete understanding of the influence these traumas have on police officers. Drawing upon current literature and positioning my embodied knowledge on these traumas, the terminology “sanctuary betrayal trauma theory” better reflects the nature of these experiences in the context of the culture of policing.