Navigating Doubt: Emotional Complexity in Child Sexual Abuse Casework

This chapter explores the relationship between emotions and values in professional social work practice. It aims to develop an empirically grounded theoretical framework that examines the role of emotions and the uncertainty experienced by professionals when handling cases of child abuse. The framework analyzes the complex circumstances in which organizational and professional institutionalized norms of objectivity and certainty intersect with individual feelings of doubt and ambiguity. What happens when instinctual feelings cloud clarity? And how do professionals navigate the nuanced concept of doubt during investigations and decision-making processes? While current institutional and organizational structures acknowledge the emotional toll of the profession, they often treat it as a negative side effect or an individual issue—comparable to burnout. This chapter proposes an alternative perspective: one that integrates emotions and interconnected professional instincts into the organizational and institutional fabric of social care workplaces. It advocates for cultivating an organizational environment that aligns the emotional and evaluative responses of professional practitioners with the structural realities of their workplaces, while also recognizing social work as a profession governed by its own institutional rules and standards.