Segmenting the Rape and Serious Sexual Offence (RASSO) investigator workforce: implications for wellbeing and burnout

There is increasing awareness of police investigators’ wellbeing and the rising prevalence of burnout symptoms, creating long-term difficulties for policing. We utilized Maslach and Leiter’s approach to segment the workforce population for Rape and Serious Sexual Offence (RASSO) investigators based on a cross-sectional survey of 18 police forces (n = 2,108) across England and Wales. We fitted a Proportional Odds model to analyze the factors associated with the odds of becoming disengaged and burned out. The findings show that RASSO investigators were grouped as ‘effective’ (39%), ‘ineffective’ (26%), ‘overextended’ (24%), ‘disengaged’ (2%) and ‘burned out’ (9%). Strong effects predicting disengagement and burnout were noted for increased stress levels and organizational or self-imposed pressures to work despite being unwell. Higher odds of being disengaged or burned out were related to dissociative views toward victim-survivors, including negative attitudes to specialist training, which we hypothesize were related to the Conservation of Resources (COR) theory, where an individual cognitively compensates in emotionally challenging situations. Increased workload, the impact on work-life balance and being mid-career (10–20 years) increased the odds of disengagement and burnout. A supportive learning environment combined with salient and credible health policies were shown to be protective factors, reducing the odds of being disengaged or burned out. Preventative interventions focusing on enhancing the learning environment alongside early identification and treating the build-up of stress to prevent long-term manifestations of burnout are recommended. The linkage between worsening RASSO investigator wellbeing and dissociative attitudes toward victim-survivors is a crucial finding from this study.