Findings: Social workers reported that such situations have intense emotional, bodily and mental impact. Their main concern is to manage overwhelming bodily manifestations of fear and tension to maintain work-related comportment.We demonstrate that social workers use emotion/body work in their attempts to control their own and their clients’ emotions. We also found that social workers’ motion/body work is informed and supported by feeling rules that revolve around their identity as professionals. Being a professional social worker means to be in control of the situation and to regard the aggression and violence of clients from a distanced, sociologized perspective. Finally, social workers note the longer term emotional consequences of their experiences, but also of their motion/body work, in the sense that some of them become habituated to violence.
Applications: The study concludes that more systematic attention should be given to the motion/body’ work of social workers who are exposed to tense and threatening situations, in both academic studies and current prevention policies and practices. While the former tend to offer a disembodied view of work place violence, the latter do not give sufficient attention to sharing and reflection on the emotional and bodily experiences among social workers.