Contagious trauma: Reframing the spatial mobility of trauma within advocacy work

- Trauma is contagious, rather than vicarious, and spatially expansive.
- Contagious trauma compounds often unrelated traumatic associations.
- Contagious trauma relies upon relationships of close engagement or proximity.
- Advocates in Darwin, Australia, experience trauma through their advocacy work.
- In response to contagious trauma, advocates construct barriers and limits.

Scholars have theorized that advocates who listen to the experiences of traumatized individuals suffer from 'vicarious trauma,' where they become affected by the process of working with trauma sufferers. Yet I argue that trauma is contagious, rather than vicarious: contagious trauma spreads, compounding and binding together sometimes unrelated life traumas. This paper focuses on the spread of contagious trauma within advocates who work together with people affected by two sets of policies that compound trauma in Australia's Northern Territory, Aboriginal Australians affected by the 2007 Northern Territory Emergency Response Legislation and asylum seekers affected by Australia's policies of mandatory detention. Using ethnographic data from participant observation and interviews with advocates as well as autoethnographic excerpts from field notes, I argue that advocates experience contagious trauma as the effects of witnessing trauma combine toxically with their own life traumas. Contagious trauma expands the destructive effects of traumatic public policy, and simultaneously shrinks the capacity of advocacy that contests these policies. Capacity shrinks as advocates construct barriers to keep trauma at bay.