Paper short abstract:

De-escalation efforts in German health and welfare services sensitize not only to the risk of being injured through a violent act, but also to the ways in which institutional life injures. Tracing this multiplicity of injury ethnographically, I examine aggression as a complex institutional object.

Paper long abstract:

Interpersonal violence and aggression are considered an occupational risk in many health and social welfare facilities in Germany. In my contribution, I draw on ethnographic research examining a specific workplace safety and violence prevention measure, namely de-escalation trainings and techniques. Linking aggression with stress, I show, de-escalation efforts sensitize not only to the risk of being injured through a violent act, but also to the ways in which institutional life injures. Following de-escalation into staff trainings, to insurance providers and into everyday practices in shelters for unhoused persons, I encountered injury as a matter of statistics, reporting and rehabilitation, but also as ruptures in social connections, as traces and reverberations of angry and violent encounters, and as a marker of vulnerability. This multiplicity of injury, I argue, makes it a powerful analytical tool to consider what kinds of institutional response aggression and violence draw within health and welfare facilities. It captures the transgressive potential of aggression in institutional spaces, where concern for its containment – for example in a body, in a situation or in a circumscribed space – as much as failure of its containment and more or less deliberate porosity for it, shape surfaces, interfaces and boundaries. The question of injury thus also poses a question of whose and which integrity is under threat, situating aggression as a complicated matter in health and welfare services, entangled in an array of care and security projects and politics.