How do school staff survive while upholding systems that cause harm?

Freyd’s betrayal trauma theory (1996) starts with the idea that trauma is more psychologically destabilising when it comes from someone—or some system—you are dependent on and trust. Abuse by a stranger wounds, but abuse by a parent, partner, or caregiver fractures the psyche at a deeper level because it requires a split: I must ignore what I know, because I need you to survive.

Freyd and Birrell (2013) confirm that betrayal trauma is associated with significantly higher rates of PTSD, dissociation, depression, anxiety, and even borderline personality disorder than interpersonal trauma from strangers. The closer the trust relationship, the deeper the harm.

When institutions betray

When this betrayal occurs in institutions—especially those charged with care, such as schools, hospitals, or religious communities—the betrayal becomes collective and systemic. The injured party is no longer just the child or caregiver; it is anyone bound by the institution’s promise to protect. The moral harm ripples outward, catching in the bodies of staff who came to help and instead became complicit.

The psychic split

In most professions, a missed opportunity or design flaw might be regrettable—a bug left in the code, a feature that could have been stronger. But in public education, an omission can mean a child is hurt. A child is left unsupported. A child is suspended for behaviours that were actually signs of distress. And the adult who let it happen—or watched it happen—goes home sick with shame.

Why staff enter—and what they discover

Educators often enter the profession with a strong identification with protective and caregiving roles. Many are drawn to teaching out of love for children, a desire to build equity, or a hope to heal what was wounded in their own school years. A former teacher of mine went back to become a professor simply because he could no longer tolerate the arrogance and cruelty of the teacher who once dismissed him. He wanted to be the antidote.

The system entices with the promise of meaning—of being the safe adult, the protector, the difference-maker. Teachers and EAs likely anticipate difficulty; they are resourceful people who believe they can hold the line. Many believe they will be the one to do it better. I felt that way too. I was optimistic, resolute in my own capacity, and ready to face the challenge—before I was harmed by the education system as a caregiver.

The realisation of complicity

Once inside the system, staff realise:

• That IEPs are routinely ignored.
• That inclusion is budgeted, not built.
• That policies about restraint, suspension, and compliance override child wellbeing.
• That naming harm is punished more severely than enacting it.

In systems driven by scarcity—where triage is the norm, and the goal is simply to keep 26 children alive, healthy, and learning—the children most likely to be traumatised are those whose bodies register stress more acutely. Neurodivergent children, already carrying heightened sensory and emotional loads, are canaries and become the first to show signs of collapse. Over time, staff internalise this pattern, not always consciously, but with devastating consequences. Some cases begin to seem like lost causes. Postures change. Expressions harden. Emotional distancing sets in. When no remedy is available, the defence becomes detachment. And somewhere, quietly, a metaphorical tow tag is placed and then it’s quiet reading time.

And so they make trade-offs. Some whisper. Some file internal memos. Some lower their eyes and say “I understand” without acting. Some dissociate to survive. But all of them participate. And if they stay—out of necessity, exhaustion, hope, or fear—they become both victim and instrument of harm.

When care becomes harm

Even witnessing harm can destabilise a classroom. When my children hear about timeouts—when they see their peers isolated or punished—it often triggers humiliation or distress, even if they are not the target. The trauma is ambient. The violence is relational. Children absorb these messages in their bodies, especially those who already live with trauma, sensitivity, or hypervigilance. And the adults? The adults absorb it too, metabolising the harm as guilt, or shame, or numbness.

This is the split: the educator becomes both recipient and agent of institutional betrayal.

They watch their students become ill, withdrawn, dysregulated. They often love the children they are told to harm through policy or silence. They feel their bodies flinch when a child is denied access, but still write the report. They know when harm is happening, and they still show up for work the next day.

Sometimes the harm is described as love. When my son was becoming dysregulated in daycare, the staff said they were hugging him to help him calm. At first, I didn’t mind. I believed they cared. But over time, I understood they were forcibly restraining him. The shock of that realisation—the violation wrapped in affection—brought me back to a moment of my own: a night after three days without sleep, sick babies in both arms, with my crying son, feeling my arms tense and squeeze too tightly for a second. The guilt surged forward like a tidal wave.

The daycare worker seemed to love my child, having cared for him for two years. She was trying her best and she was failing. And I have failed too. And now, when my children are failed at school, that failure feels like an extension of mine—as if I allowed them to be crushed by a system I should have seen more clearly. I look at their teachers, see the desperate plea in their eyes, the hope that I might do something, the silent acknowledgement that we are all trapped. I don’t want to do their job, either of them.

What does it mean to hurt someone while trying to help them?

I know the answer. It means loving a child and still carrying out harm because the institution gave you no other option. It means feeling that harm pass through your own body and carrying on. It means waking up sick with guilt and showing up again. It means believing in dignity and still denying access. It means being reshaped by contradiction until you cannot tell where your own ethics end and the institution’s survival begins.

I know these feelings because I have carried them too. The guilt of silence. The shame of complicity. The sickening awareness that I have sometimes failed to protect my children because I was too depleted to act, too bound by legality or custody or fear. I have said yes when I wanted to scream no. I have sat at tables where harm was named and nothing changed. And still I showed up. So when I look at staff who are doing the same—who are hurting children while telling themselves they are helping—I do not stand apart from them. I stand alongside them, wishing I would be brave enough to blow up my life to stop this suffering.

In these moments, staff become entangled in a double bind. They are told to care, but punished for acting on it. They are told to maintain order, but shamed when the method of control reveals itself as harm. So they reach for what feels good: a rule, a soothing phrase, a behavioural plan. The gesture becomes the justification. And the child becomes the casualty.

I wonder whether some staff sense this collapse but find no sanctioned way to process it. I know I did. So I tried everything: I retreated. I defended my choices. I became sharp, then sick. I dissociated just enough to make it through one more day. I bent myself around the edges of a system that harmed my child, and still I stayed, believing perhaps I could soften the blow, redirect the damage, make it bearable. But harm cannot be made bearable. Only named. Only ended.

Because to see the truth in full—to hold the intimacy of harm and still face the mirror—might demand a reckoning too heavy to carry alone.

Between empathy and rage

And then there are moments that leave no place to stand. I remember sitting across from Jeannie’s teacher, a woman whose eyes welled with tears as she quietly disclosed that her daughter had ADHD too, and that she was waiting for an autism assessment. Her voice wavered with exhaustion, but she meant to show me that she understood, that she was trying, that we shared something.

The conversation was about why she kept putting my daughter in time out for speaking out of turn. She said she had to rule the classroom carefully because it was just her and very many kids. She said she had crowd-sourced the rules and that they came from the kids, so she thought they were fair. This was meant to mollify me.

But the disgust and indignation on my face betrayed me. You crowd-sourced rules about kids? I wanted to scream. You, the teacher, with a literal degree in education, have allowed children to decide how justice is served? You abdicated responsibility for the rules, didn’t vet them for inclusion, didn’t consider trauma-informed practice—and you want me to agree this is fair? 

I was flabbergasted. I was silenced. I was spinning between two poles: the intense psychic empathy for a woman clearly in pain, and the rising vitriol toward someone who had acted with such reckless, sincere stupidity. I wanted to forgive her. I wanted to throttle her. I wanted to make it make sense. But none of it made sense! We were both drowning. And my child was still in the water.

Her decision—like so many others—was framed as participatory. She believed, perhaps earnestly, that involving students in setting rules would create fairness. But justice crowdsourced is justice abandoned. Inclusion cannot be delegated to the loudest voice in the room. It must be designed, safeguarded, held. The abdication of that responsibility is not neutral—it reproduces hierarchy and re-enacts harm.

Why systems protect themselves

Sara Ahmed’s work on institutional will, such as Institutional Habits, helps us understand this stasis—the tendency of institutions to fail to act precisely when action would endanger their coherence.

Ahmed argues that institutions maintain their shape and power through repeated, embodied patterns—habits—that seem ordinary but actually prevent transformation. These habits include deflecting complaint, rewarding institutional loyalty over truth-telling, and converting critiques into processes that go nowhere. The institution promises change, but protects itself through performance. When someone raises a concern (e.g. about racism, ableism, or harm), the institution appears to listen while doing nothing. This performance becomes habit. The person who names the problem is framed as the problem—too negative, too emotional, too unprofessional. Over time, the institution maintains its coherence not by resolving the issue, but by expelling or discrediting the one who dared to complain.

The Canary Collective describes this condition with piercing clarity.

“I was placed under investigation. I was removed from the school and told to stay home. I was not allowed to share my story with anyone. It was a lonely experience that directly mirrored the exclusionary tactics I was challenging on behalf of my students. I was made to stay quiet. Districts protect themselves by twisting the idea of ​​fiduciary duty into a weapon, citing loyalty to the employer above all else. Not to truth. Not to students. Not to justice.”

When Speaking Up Becomes a Risk

Ahmed names the slow violence of institutional habit—how structures maintain coherence through the looping of complaint into process, and the quiet dismissal of those who disrupt the institutional image. The Canary Collective gives flesh to this theory: a teacher who raised concerns about exclusion was silenced, punished, and cast out because she saw too clearly. Her words, like Ahmed’s analysis, reveal how loyalty is weaponised, how truth-telling is framed as betrayal, and how institutions survive by exiling those who expose the harm they are built to deny.

The poison of truth must be contained, and so it is forced into the bodies of staff—those who know too much to comply in full, but have too little power to resist without consequence.

A multidimensional betrayal

I have wanted to withdraw my children since kindergarten. I knew, even then, that the system would harm them. I fought with their father for years—fiercely, bitterly, until the marriage itself dissolved—and still I was unable to protect them. I do not hold full legal decision-making power. My lawyer advised that a judge would likely consider school withdrawal an act against their best interests. And so I remained in this war—eight years of pleading, documenting, witnessing harm I could not stop.

This is the fourth time I have tried to write about moral injury among staff, and each time I find myself circling the same impossible question: how do people endure inside a system that harms children and still preserve a sense of ethical selfhood?

I keep returning to this task because the question itself reveals something vital—that even attempting to understand this split exposes the emotional toll it takes to witness, record, and survive institutional betrayal from the outside. I cannot imagine how it feels from within. And still, despite everything I have read and written and felt, I cannot truly understand why someone would willingly choose to work in that school. Maybe the question itself is a misdirection—because I also kept showing up, even when it broke me.

So the betrayal becomes multidimensional:

• The system betrays children.
• The system betrays caregivers.
• The system betrays staff.
• And it demands staff betray children in order to remain.

This is textbook institutional betrayal: a betrayal by the very institution people rely on for ethical purpose, relational meaning, and livelihood. And this betrayal does not only affect those it targets. It injures those who carry it out. It wounds those who remain silent. It hollows those who stay.