What's your threshold?
Written by Mark S. Roach
Founder & Principal Advisor, Summit to Shore Human Centred Leadership Advisory. With more than 35 years of experience spanning healthcare, rehabilitation, disability management, workplace mental health, and insurance leadership, Mark writes about leadership, systems accountability, and the human experience behind organizational decisions.
Contribution from Linda Crockett, MSW, BSW, SEP
Workplace psychological safety expert and trauma therapist specializing in workplace harm. Founder of the Canadian Institute of Workplace Bullying Resources (CIWBR), a for-profit organization, and of the Canadian Institute of Workplace Harassment and Violence (CIWHV), a charity from which Linda has since retired. Over nearly 40 years in social work, including 17 years working with leaders and organizational systems, Linda has supported people who have been harmed and witnesses affected by what they have seen, and worked with those who cause harm. Linda's work examines early warning signs, institutional betrayal, and how organizational responses can deepen harm or support recovery, as well as the human side of returning to work: safety, dignity, and sustainable reintegration. Linda has reviewed this article, including the sections drawing on that expertise.
About a 7 minute read
On 14 July 2026, a social worker in Rexton, New Brunswick was assaulted during a home visit. They suffered a concussion, went to an emergency room, and left after waiting six hours without being seen. Their union, CUPE 1418, says the incident was not isolated: threats and violence against social workers in the province are increasing, and 80 social work positions stood vacant in July. The assault is serious on its own. What stays with me is how much was already visible before that day: conditions that were known, described as worsening, and still unresolved when someone was hurt.
None of this was hidden. Shawna Morton, president of CUPE 1418, says incidents like this one are "getting more and more regular," and that another worker is on leave after receiving threats. Morton would like social workers to attend home visits in pairs, but the shortage makes that impossible most days. The formal call for a provincial workforce survey came after the assault, not before it. In a statement, the New Brunswick Association of Social Workers said the assault reinforces the need to maintain adequate staffing levels, and that frontline social workers "have long served as first responders. It is time they are recognized as such."
Nor is the risk confined to one province. In its 2018 survey of 3,258 social workers across Canada, the Canadian Association of Social Workers (CASW) found that 44% of social workers in child protection roles had experienced threats or violence on the job, and that 45% of those who left the field did so because of vicarious trauma or overwhelming stress.
For Linda Crockett, who contributed to this article, those numbers are not abstract.
Between 1994 and 2007, as a child protection social worker, I witnessed numerous attacks on social workers. I saw a colleague thrown down stairs and seriously injured, and I faced a shotgun at a doorway. There was no debriefing, no support, and no change to the processes that exposed us. We worked beside nurses, paramedics, firefighters, and police in crises, but our risks were seldom recognized. Social workers have been overlooked for decades. I would like to see a national poll asking social workers whether we feel recognized, protected, and/or supported by our professional associations, with the results made public. Recognition means listening to the answer and changing what happens next. Who advocates for the advocate?
— Linda Crockett, MSW, BSW, SEP
In November 2025, CASW called on the federal government to include social workers in the definition of public safety personnel, noting that social workers are often called on to complete emergency investigations without the accompaniment of law enforcement, and that their exclusion denies them the operational stress injury supports available to firefighters, police officers, paramedics, and other recognized personnel.
The harm that comes before the injury
The assault may have been the most visible injury-producing event, but it may not have been the beginning of the worker's exposure to harm. In a 2025 survey of 80 child welfare workers across seven provinces and two territories, Regehr and colleagues found that in the previous year, 35% had been threatened with physical harm and 14% had been pushed. Among the forms of in-person violence measured, threats were associated with the highest levels of traumatic stress symptoms. The sample is small, but the finding matters: the harm that registers least on an incident report may weigh most heavily on the worker. This is not a new finding. Two decades earlier, Regehr and colleagues surveyed 175 staff at a large child welfare agency in Toronto and found that 24% had been assaulted on the job and 53% had been threatened with violence at some point in their careers.
That finding sits within a broader body of evidence. A systematic review of prospective studies among health-care, social-care, and education workers, led by Anna Nyberg, found consistent, mostly medium-quality evidence linking threats, harassment, and physical violence with poorer mental health. Threat, understaffing, and unanswered concerns are psychosocial hazards in their own right. Canada's voluntary national standard for psychological health and safety, CAN/CSA-Z1003-13/BNQ 9700-803/2013 (R2022), is built around preventing psychological harm, not only responding to it.
Voice without response
An organization can have a functioning channel for concerns and still fail, if raising a concern does not change what happens next. Voice without response does not sustain psychological safety. It is simply a pressure valve that makes leadership feel informed while nothing structural moves. People notice. Frances Milliken, Elizabeth Morrison, and Patricia Hewlin found that a quarter of the 40 employees they interviewed described staying silent because speaking up would not make a difference. Jim Detert and Ethan Burris found, across more than 3,000 employees, that a manager's openness to input shaped whether employees felt safe to speak at all. The staffing gap, the escalating threats, and the eventual injury in Rexton were not three separate events. They were one slow-moving failure, visible at every stage to the people living inside it.
Amy Edmondson defines psychological safety as a shared belief that it is safe to take interpersonal risks at work. Timothy Clark's four stages of psychological safety build on that idea and help separate two things people often collapse into one: whether employees feel safe enough to speak, and whether the organization is able to hear them and act. The fourth and hardest stage, challenger safety, is what lets someone tell a supervisor that a caseload is unsafe, or that a colleague needs backup on a home visit, without fear that raising it will cost them standing, be filed and forgotten, or simply change nothing.
Of working Canadians, 69% say their employer responds effectively when physical risks are identified. For psychological risks, 52% say the same.
— Mental Health Research Canada, 2023
Middle managers carry much of that weight, and Canadian workers see their organizations carrying it unevenly. In a Mental Health Research Canada survey of 5,505 working Canadians, 69% said their employer responds effectively, often or always, when physical risks are identified. When psychological risks are identified, 52% said the same. A worker who raises a staffing concern may be raising it to a manager who believes them and still cannot move the resource that would fix it.
There is a corollary worth naming. If voice without response cannot sustain psychological safety, then, as Linda Crockett puts it, response without repair is incomplete psychological safety. Telling workers that an organization now takes safety seriously does not on its own restore trust. Trust is rebuilt through what happens next: acknowledgement, transparency, real protection, accountability, and a visibly changed condition.
When the warning comes true
When workers repeatedly identify a danger, reasonably expect their organization to protect them, and subsequently experience the very harm they warned about, the injury can acquire another dimension: a rupture in trust between worker and institution. Researchers call this institutional betrayal, a term Carly Parnitzke Smith and Jennifer Freyd brought into wide use to describe an institution's failure to adequately prevent or respond to harm affecting people who depend upon it. A 2024 scoping review by Christl and colleagues notes that this failure can come through inaction, not only through active harm.
Linda Crockett's model describes a related pattern, secondary organizational injury, in which harm is caused or amplified by an institution after it has been put on notice. Crockett developed the model; her co-authors contributed research to the paper presenting it. The model is practice-informed and has not yet been empirically tested. It was developed to address workplace mobbing among colleagues rather than violence from clients, but its central idea has relevance beyond that context: after credible warnings emerge, there is a window in which timely action can contain harm. When that opportunity is missed, the organization's own inaction can become part of how the injury unfolds.
Where is your threshold?
Every organization has a threshold of risk, whether or not anyone has named it: the point at which a concern stops being something to note and becomes something to act on. In Rexton, the conditions were known before July: vacancies the province had not filled, threats described as increasing, a worker already on leave after being threatened, and a safety practice the staffing could not support. What moved the issue into public view, and produced a formal call for a workforce survey, was a concussion.
When a physical injury is what finally registers, the threshold has been set at observable harm rather than at risk. The same pattern appears in how Canadian employers spend. In a 2026 report for CSA Group's Public Policy Centre, Morawczynski, Dobson, and Howatt estimate that only about 14% of employer spending on mental health goes to prevention; the rest is spent after harm has occurred. An organization that acts only after an injury has not failed to see the risk. In effect, it has decided, perhaps without anyone saying so, how much harm a risk must cause before it counts.
So the question is not only where your organization sits on Clark's fourth stage: challenger safety. It is where your threshold sits. What does it take for a warning from your frontline to change a decision: a pattern of reports, a formal complaint, a union grievance, or an injury? Choose one concern that the same team has raised more than once, and trace what happened to it after it was heard. If nothing changed, ask what would have had to happen for it to change. That answer is your threshold. Far better to set it deliberately, alongside the people closest to the risk, than to learn where it was after someone has been hurt.
Crockett suggests extending that exercise. Alongside what happened to the concern, trace what happened to the worker: what they experienced, what they were asked to do, and what would need to be true before they could reasonably trust the workplace again. Trace the concern. Trace the response. Trace the worker. Trace the repair.
If this raised something for you, I’d welcome hearing from you.
Sources
Canadian Association of Social Workers. (2018). Understanding social work and child welfare: Canadian survey and interviews with child welfare experts. CASW. https://www.casw-acts.ca/files/attachements/CASW_Child_Welfare_Report_-_2018.pdf
Canadian Association of Social Workers. (2025, November 26). Social workers excluded as public safety personnel [Position statement]. CASW. https://www.casw-acts.ca/en/social-workers-excluded-public-safety-personnel
Christl, M.-E., Tran Pham, K.-C., Rosenthal, A., & DePrince, A. P. (2024). When institutions harm those who depend on them: A scoping review of institutional betrayal. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 25(4), 2797–2813. https://doi.org/10.1177/15248380241226627
Clark, T. R. (2020). The 4 stages of psychological safety: Defining the path to inclusion and innovation. Berrett-Koehler.
Crockett, L., Afraz, A., Borthakur, D., & De Agostini, M. (2026). A trauma-informed model for addressing workplace mobbing. Journal of Workplace Mobbing, 2(1). https://journalofworkplacemobbing.org/index.php/jwm/article/view/1070
CSA Group & Bureau de normalisation du Québec. (2013, reaffirmed 2022). CAN/CSA-Z1003-13/BNQ 9700-803/2013 (R2022): Psychological health and safety in the workplace — Prevention, promotion, and guidance to staged implementation. CSA Group. https://www.csagroup.org/article/can-csa-z1003-13-bnq-9700-803-2013-r2022-psychological-health-and-safety-in-the-workplace/
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Regehr, C., Lefebvre, R., Fallon, B., Mishna, F., Schiffer, J., Baginsky, M., & Alfandari, R. (2025). Experiences of in-person violence and cyberviolence against child welfare workers in Canada. The British Journal of Social Work. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcaf192
Regehr, C., Leslie, B., Howe, P., & Chau, S. (2005). Stress, trauma, and support in child welfare practice. The APSAC Advisor, 17, 12–18.
Smith, C. P., & Freyd, J. J. (2014). Institutional betrayal. American Psychologist, 69(6), 575–587. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037564
Linda Crockett has given permission to use her work and her account of practice in this article, and has reviewed the sections that refer to her work for accuracy.
© 2026 Summit to Shore Human Centred Leadership Advisory. All rights reserved for this article. Attribution required for reprint or adaptation. Free to share, with credit.