From injury to injury: how administrative burdens spark secondary victimization crises, trust breakdowns and harmful psychosocial outcomes

Multiple crises have emerged where the initial damage is only half the story, as public authorities’ attempts to resolve the crisis result in an administrative quagmire so extensive that citizens become victimized twice. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some of these secondary victimization crises can trap citizens in administrative burdens for periods of over a decade, producing effects ranging from mistrust in government to psychosomatic and mental health complaints (e.g. burnout and depression). Although these phenomena have been picked up on in both European and US media (e.g. Michigan’s MIDAS wrongful unemployment fraud accusations (De La Garza, 2020) or the childcare benefits fraud scandal in The Netherlands (Henley, 2021)), systematic studies have hardly been undertaken. Our understanding of how time and administrative burden interact during such protracted crises therefore remains insufficient. Extending prior work on administrative burden, psychological stress and procedural (in)justice, this contribution emphasizes how protracted experiences of administrative burdens may progressively grind down citizens’ trust, resilience and ultimately even health. We argue that temporal accumulations of bureaucratic interactions, stress, time spent in uncertainty, and repeated experiences of perceived injustice may combine to exacerbate the ‘usual’ costs of administrative burdens, and in turn lead to potentially severe psychosocial and psychosomatic outcomes. We rely on a combination of 15 interviews and secondary qualitative data from Irish and Dutch cases (MICA defective blocks crisis, childcare benefits affair and Groninger Gas crisis) to provide initial qualitative insights into these dynamics.