What Is Moral Injury?

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Moral injury occurs within policing as well as frontline services such as healthcare.

Moral injury causes officers to doubt the extent to which their work has a positive impact.

Managers should be proactive in providing resources to help employees who may experience moral injury.

Everyone suffers loss. Personal loss is painful; professional loss can also be painful, especially when our occupation provides a strong sense of identity. In cases where professional loss feels personal, we turn to peers and colleagues as well as family and friends to help us bounce back, usually through talking, because recovering from trauma requires encouragement and inspiration, not silence. Recent research examines the damaging effects of silence in managing trauma that has its roots in moral injury.

Moral Injury on the Front Lines

Studying moral injury within policing, Patricia Pariona-Cabrera et al. (2026)[i] adopted a research-based definition of the term as “the psychological distress” officers experience when exposed to trauma as a result of “perpetrating,........

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