Protecting the Protectors: NCITE Explores Trauma in Counterterrorism Work

The escalating conflict in the Middle East has flooded the world with images of the violence and horror of terrorism. For those working in counterterrorism – as government professionals or academic researchers – viewing disturbing material like this is part of the job.

And it can take a profound toll.

On Oct. 19, NCITE and the University of Nebraska at Omaha's Division of Student Life and Wellbeing hosted an expert panel that explored the causes and impact of trauma on those in the counterterrorism mission community.

The event included remarks from keynote speaker Celia Durall, executive director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). Durall previously served as acting chief of the IC Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Office. She has experience leading the design, development, and execution of human resource strategies to support those who serve in U.S. intelligence agencies.

Panelists were:

• Matthew Crayne, Ph.D., SUNY Albany | Crayne is an assistant professor of management in SUNY Albany's Massry Center for Business. His research focuses on the intersection of leadership, values, and identity in the workplace, currently centered on the causes of values-based harm. He leads an NCITE project examining the effects of trauma on terrorism researchers.
• Neil Shortland, Ph.D., University of Massachusetts Lowell | Shortland is an associate professor and director of UMass Lowell's Center for Terrorism and Security Studies. His research focuses on the psychological aspects of domestic and international security. Alongside Crayne, he leads an NCITE project examining the effects of trauma on terrorism researchers.
• Daisy Muibu, Ph.D. | Muibu is an assistant professor of security studies. Her research examines the relationship between terrorism, domestic security, counterinsurgency, the public, and civil conflict. She co-leads an NCITE project that examines the effects of trauma on counterterrorism practitioners.

Watch a full recording above and read on for more insights.

Matthew Crayne, Ph.D.
SUNY University at Albany

"One of the biggest barriers to the recognition and support of people who have had traumatic experiences in this work is a disconnect between what supervisors understand the work to be and what the people who are doing the most detailed work ... are actually experiencing."

Key Points

• Address institutional and organizational policies to create pathways for developing support programs.
• Increasing awareness of what counterterrorism workers are going through is essential. This opens up the door for supervisors and others to provide support.
• Managers need to be able to step into the shoes of the people viewing the material so they know what individuals on their teams are going through.

Celia Durall
National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC)

"Leaders must create a welcoming and supportive environment for all those who share our mission. And our people need a set of reliable tools and methods to respond to evolving threats."

Key Points

• Counterterrorism and intelligence community leaders have a responsibility to create a psychologically safe workplace.
• Building a diverse, resilient, and adaptive workforce is a mission imperative for addressing today's national security challenges.

Daisy Muibu, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Security Studies

"Interestingly ... we found a protective factor that came out of the interviews with this idea of having value-laden work. This idea that you feel that the work that you're doing really closely ties to your own personal values."

Key Points

• Make sure counterterrorism professionals see the value, mission, and purpose of their work, to help serve as a protective factor to experiencing secondary trauma.
• Due to the prolonged exposure from violent materials, it is easy to burn out. Thus, creating support opportunities and resources early on can help to prevent burnout.

Neil Shortland, Ph.D.
University of Massachusetts Lowell

"It is really quite difficult sometimes to do the job that we have to do ... we can't shy away from doing research in difficult areas. We as academics have a responsibility to understand it and to help the best that we can."

Key Points

• Interventions can be targeted to the individual, material, or organization. Making changes at different levels can ease the burden on individuals.
• Build strong support systems. Building awareness and looking out for our peers for when people maybe experiencing secondary trauma-informed symptoms is crucial, because it should not be left to the individual to know when they have reached their limits.

Research Roundup: More Insights on Trauma in the Field of Counterterrorism

Check out the below selection of academic literature highlighting mental health among counterterrorism professionals and researchers. The list was curated by NCITE junior research associates.

Compassion Fatigue, Secondary Traumatic Stress, and Vicarious Traumatization: A Qualitative Review and Research Agenda

By Rachel Rauvola, Dulce Vega, & Kristi Lavigne (2019)

This article provides a qualitative review of empathy-based stress literature. While this article focuses on professions that are empathy-related, the authors provide a review of stress experienced by terrorism researchers. They provide a model of empathy-based stress, with secondhand trauma and empathic engagement being pivotal for the emergence of empathy-based strain, thereby leading to adverse occupational health and wellbeing outcomes. Empathy-based strain includes compassion fatigue (affective phenomenon that parallels symptoms of the original trauma victim), secondary traumatic stress (stress reaction resulting from exposure to others’ traumatic material), and vicarious traumatization (disruption in cognitive schema resulting from empathic engagement with others’ traumatic material). Knowledge gaps that exist in the literature include understanding how the empathy-based strain constructs relate to each other, the temporal nature of empathy-based stress, how empathy-based stress emerges in other professions (i.e., counterterrorism research), and the best way to measure and design studies examining empathy-based stress.

Key Takeaways

• Empathy-based strain is influenced by secondhand trauma, empathic engagement, individual factors (i.e., coping skills) and contextual factors (form and frequency of trauma exposure).
• Empathy-based strain can lead to burnout, depression, anxiety, as well as poor work performance, turnover, and satisfaction.
• More rigorous qualitative methods and mixed-methods studies need to be conducted to further the understanding of compassion fatigue, secondary traumatic stress, and vicarious trauma.

Trauma in the U.S. Intelligence Community: Risks and Responses

By Karen M. Sudkamp, Heather J. Williams, Lisa H. Jaycox, Molly Dunigan, & Stephanie Young (2022)

Through reviewing existing RAND and academic research on trauma, combined with interviews and a focus group with intelligence community (IC) and RAND professionals, this article develops a conceptual model for reactions to stress and trauma in the IC workplace. The model consists of traumatic events, including direct and secondary/vicarious trauma, and moral injuries. Characteristics that elicit stress also include workplace characteristics such as long hours, short staffing, and poor leadership. The effects of trauma and workplace characteristics are influenced by organizational and personal mitigating and risk factors. While secondary trauma can include symptoms similar to PTSD and professional burnout, positive outcomes include post-traumatic growth, which is a transformative positive change resulting from highly challenging life crises, and compassion satisfaction, which is the pleasure in doing work that contributes to the safety of the greater good of society. To foster these positive outcomes, organizations should build a more supportive culture and create conditions that foster trust and safety by designing formal roles for attentive companionship.

Key Takeaways

• There are various factors that may mitigate or enhance the negative mental, emotional, and behavioral risks associated with trauma for IC employees. These include individual differences, one’s organizational environment, and interventions to address mental health.
• Future researchers should focus on gathering more data on a representative sample across the 18 intelligence agencies.
• Future researchers need to examine the most effective methods of communication within the IC regarding building mental health resilience.

Online Extremism and Terrorism Researchers’ Security, Safety, and Resilience: Findings from the Field

By Elizabeth Pearson, Joe Whittaker, Till Baaken, Sara Zeiger, Farangiz Atamuradova, & Maura Conway (2023)

This report presents the findings from interviews conducted with online extremism and terrorism researchers based at universities, think tanks, and other research institutes. The report examines the harms of online extremism and terrorism research and the coping mechanisms and institutional supports that build resilience to and diminish such harms. Researchers can receive direct threats and harassment, experience poor mental and emotional health outcomes, and experience hinderances to career progression as a result of repeatedly viewing terrorism content. Unfortunately, many institutions examined lacked adequate support mechanisms for extremism and terrorism researchers to address such harms, such as wellbeing provisions and trainings. Interestingly, almost a third of respondents (primarily more tenured) reported suffering no negative effects based on their terrorism research, suggesting that the harms of such work can be mitigated through a supportive, informal extremism and terrorism research community, greater awareness of the threats of online spaces, and reflection of one’s identity characteristics (e.g., gender, religion, tenure, etc.)

Key Takeaways

• Three types of harm to emerge from online extremism and terrorism research include harms caused by third parties (external), harms that are psychological or emotional (internal), and harms that can affect one’s work (professional harm).
• Informal research communities are essential for helping researchers deal with such harms.
• Formalized, better informed, and targeted institutional support is needed and can be provided by greater support from ethical review boards, greater institution-provided trainings, and greater wellbeing provisions tailored to online extremism and terrorism researchers.
• It is important for researchers to commit to helping future generations of researchers, sharing positive stories and tips to build resilience against mental health threats.

Understanding the Trauma-Related Effects of Terrorist Propaganda on Researchers

By Miron Lakomy and Maciej Bozek (2023)

The Global Network on Extremism & Technology (GNET) examined the short- and long-term effects of viewing terrorist content online through an online survey and an experiment using biofeedback devices and eye-tracking measures. The authors find that constant exposure to terrorist propaganda elicited emotional responses such as sadness, irritation, and fear, and behavioral reactions such as problems with concentration, headaches, and even memory loss. More junior researchers appear to be less aware of these risks, indicating the need to create training that builds awareness and resilience to the adverse effects of viewing extreme content. Experienced terrorism researchers also experienced more unstable emotional states, with participants focusing on gore content (faces of victims, injuries, and blood).

Key Takeaways

• Constant exposure to terrorist propaganda elicits negative emotional, behavioral, and physiological outcomes.
• Organizations should do more to support their terrorist researchers through ensuring equitable access to mental health and mental health training for junior researchers.
• Promising coping strategies include selective attention, reducing screen time when it comes to viewing terrorist content, humor, and taking breaks.

How to Maintain Mental Hygiene as an Open Source Researcher

By Giancarlo Fiorella (2022)

This article provides recommendations for building resilience against vicarious trauma, which the author defines as mental distress emerging from frequent or repeated interactions with graphic online media. With the goal of avoiding burnout, depression, and other negative effects of viewing traumatic material, Fiorella and his colleagues at Bellingcat recommend researchers mute videos and fast forward through them to preview the material. The author also recommends blurring images online and reading the context in order to make an educated decision whether it’s necessary to view the material in full. Fiorella also suggests engaging in healthy work-life balance, such as avoiding email and other work-related activity that may allow for the interaction with disturbing content.

Key Takeaways

• Researchers of terrorist and other trauma-inducing content should do their due diligence in making sure the content they are going to view is necessary to consume.
• Researchers need to take steps to preview potentially traumatic material before interacting with such material in full.
• Researchers can take care of their mental health by creating barriers between their work and home life and taking regular breaks during work.

Repeated and Extensive Exposure to Online Terrorist Content: Counter-Terrorism Internet Referral Unit Perceived Stresses and Strategies

By Zoey Reeve (2020)

This article examines the adaptive coping mechanisms used by the United Kingdom’s Metropolitan Police Counter-Terrorism internet Referral Unit (CTIRU) Case Officers (COs). These professionals are charged with removing terrorism material from the internet. Through semi-structured interviews, COs reported that execution techniques used by ISIS, and material that includes children are particularly traumatic. Viewing such traumatic material tends to lead to negative emotional (crying uncontrollably) and mental (intrusive flashbacks) responses. Some adaptive coping mechanisms that COs use include discussing the material and using dark humor with colleagues, remembering the impact of their role as COs, compartmentalization, and exercise. Recommendations include raising awareness of the factors that influence one’s vulnerability to terrorism material, building resilience among COs by establishing a supportive community of professionals in the field, and encouraging the use of effective coping mechanisms.

Key Takeaways

• ISIS execution videos and material dealing with children tended to be the most disturbing and traumatic.
• There are various adaptive coping mechanisms that involve individual, social, and organizational factors.
• Organizations should clearly and consistently encourage terrorism researchers to utilize their occupational health resources.

Content Moderators’ Strategies for Coping with the Stress of Moderating Content Online

By Ruth Spence, Amy Harrison, Paula Bradbury, Paul Bleakley, Elena Martellozzo, & Jeffrey DeMarco (2023)

This article examines the coping mechanisms of 11 content moderators exposed to child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Through semi-structured interviews, the authors found that content moderators find great value in establishing social support, especially among colleagues, and feeling that their work is valued and appreciated by others. In terms of individual strategies, content moderators emphasized creating a boundary between their home and work life and engaging in emotion regulation practices such as intense physical exercise. Lastly, content moderators reported the desire for organizations to provide autonomy and flexibility when they are overwhelmed and mandatory therapeutic support from professionals that have experience supporting those exposed to CSAM.

Key Takeaways

• Content moderators value informal support, particularly through talking to other colleagues about moderation work and receiving feedback that their work is valued and has a real-world impact.
• Separating work from home life and engaging in activities that allow for emotion regulation (i.e., exercise or other hobbies) are behaviors that content moderators can do on an individual basis.
• Organizations can help individuals consuming harmful material by providing therapeutic support and flexibility for employees when they are feeling overwhelmed.
• More research is needed to understand the effectiveness of these coping mechanisms.

A Scoping Review of Vicarious Trauma Interventions for Service Providers Working with People Who Have Experienced Traumatic Events

By Jeongsuk Kim, Brittney Chesworth, Hannabeth Franchino-Olsen, & Rebecca J. Macy (2022)

This article reviews 27 studies, published between 2008 and 2019, that examine the efficacy of interventions aimed at addressing vicarious trauma among service providers working with traumatized clients. The four types of interventions found were psychoeducation (e.g., education about symptoms of vicarious trauma), mindfulness (e.g., meditation, yoga), art and recreational programs (e.g., online poetry therapy), and alternative medicine therapy (e.g., auricular acupuncture program). Many of the interventions were linked to reductions in secondary trauma stress, compassion fatigue, burnout, and other negative mental health outcomes. But the authors call for more rigorous research on interventions directly addressing the effects of vicarious trauma.

Key Takeaways

• Psychoeducation and mindfulness interventions are the most popular and promising types of interventions addressing the effects of vicarious trauma.
• More research is needed on creating interventions that specifically define and target vicarious trauma for specific settings and that go beyond self-care and general stress management interventions.

Explore NCITE Research

NCITE is investigating the problem of trauma in the counterterrorism workforce in dual research projects. Learn more about both:

• Vicarious Trauma in Counterterrorism Practitioners: The project aims to explain how counterterrorism professionals are affected by exposure to violent materials, to what extent vicarious trauma is affecting the counterterrorism workforce, and what tools exist or may be modified to mitigate these potential harmful impacts on the homeland security enterprise.
• Understanding Trauma in Counterterrorism Researchers: This project seeks to identify the types of psychological trauma that terrorism researchers experience and determine how widespread trauma is among the workforce. It also seeks to identify risk factors and explain the impact of trauma on performance and retention.