The filtered workforce

Who enters, who stays, who leaves — and what the difference looks like in the room

The frontline safeguarding workforce a family encounters has, on the structural argument advanced here, been selected across the length of a career for capacity to perform the institutional work under conditions that produce documented secondary trauma and that have removed many of the practitioners least able to compartmentalise the work. This is an interpretive structural-selection model, not a demonstrated mechanism. An African carer, watching two such practitioners at work, named what she saw in eight words. This essay is explicit about what the evidence supports, what remains an interpretive hypothesis, and what alternative explanations operate alongside the workforce-psychology argument.

By Antisocial Care