When Stories Tire: Narrative Expectation and Compassion Fatigue in Asylum Helping Encounters

Given the critical role of national authorities in the asylum process, sociolinguistic research on inequalities in narrative assessment has prioritised the high-stakes hearings within the official process. It is, however, also crucial to analyse how non-state actors play a central role in asylum bureaucracies. Accordingly, this article focuses on “helping encounters” with social workers, guardians and lawyers on the “backstage side” of the asylum procedure. Drawing on linguistic-ethnographic fieldwork data in the form of participant observation, interviews and audio-recordings, the article reveals striking parallels between the interactional conditions of different social work settings in which service providers familiarise applicants with narrative expectations. Bureaucratic ideologies permeate these environments where mutual trust is indispensable, and applicant/practitioner relationships risk being compromised as a result. This culminates in “compassion fatigue”, a tension between service providers’ frustrations with procedural constraints and their sincere desire for the applicant to succeed. Social workers, limited by the legal boundaries of the system they operate in, can be seen mimicking officials’ interrogation-like style to reanimate the asylum authorities’ judicial reasoning. In this way, they (unintentionally) reproduce the frontstage “culture of disbelief” in the “trusting” backstage.