Violence toward child protection workers is widely documented, yet existing research has been largely produced in high-income countries, offering limited insight into how this phenomenon is experienced and understood in more precarious service contexts. This study examines how workers in residential child protection services in Chile make sense of client-perpetrated violence. A qualitative design was employed, based on 19 semi-structured interviews with staff in different roles, analyzed through thematic content analysis.
Findings show that violence is not only frequent but also actively constructed as an inherent and unavoidable component of child protection work. Workers predominantly attribute violent incidents to children’s prior trauma and emotional dysregulation, which shifts responsibility away from organizational and systemic conditions. This framing contributes to the normalization of violence and to a limited recognition of workers’ own role in its prevention. At the same time, structural factors—such as staff turnover, insufficient training, and the absence of specific protocols—remain under acknowledged in everyday interpretations, despite shaping exposure to violence.
By foregrounding these meaning-making processes, the study moves beyond prevalence-based accounts and highlights how violence is sustained through institutional and cultural dynamics within an outsourced and precarized child protection system. The findings underscore the need for preventive strategies that address not only individual skills but also organizational and structural conditions, particularly in under-researched Latin American contexts.