Marie Jauffret-Roustide is a Sociologist, Research Fellow at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research in Paris. She leads an international comparative research program on harm reduction policies, drug user’s activist groups history as well as on cannabis regulations at an international level, in Europe and North America.

Background
People who use drugs suffers from stigmatization from prohibitive regimes, that prevents their access to appropriate care and can lead to violence. Very few research examine how harm reduction professionals experience this violence in their daily work. We set up a sociological research project to understand the different forms of violence to which professionals may be exposed, their experiences and representations, and the solutions to be implemented.
 
Methods
Our research is based on a community-based methodology and includes ethnographic on-site observations, individual interviews and focus groups. In 2024,  120 harm reduction workers including peers participate to our research in 20 services and 15 cities, in France.
 
Results
Our research shows that the violence faced by professionals takes many forms. The violence that is the most frequently mentioned is daily difficulties for implementing strong harm reduction policies in prohibitive regimes caused by a lack of political support, leading harm reduction workers to feel sometimes not able to do their work in an adequate and ethical manner.  As a consequence, some of them report to feel being themselves in a violent position vis-à-vis people they receive, as they may consider to be unable to adequately answer to the needs of people due to the lack of appropriate political resources. 
Harm reduction workers said little about the physical and verbal violence they have themselves to face. When they sometimes mention violence coming from the people they welcome in their facilities, they tend to talk more about the violence from the narratives of the people they care for, highlighting structural violence from psycho-trauma, migration, precariousness and gender experiences, and to stigmatization in a more global sense. 
 
Conclusion
Our research highlights that violence represents a critical focal point for harm reduction workers that needs to be adequately adressed at organizational and political levels.