The Moral Injury Centre was founded in response to a growing truth:
Moral injury does not only occur in war zones. It occurs in workplaces.

In hospitals, classrooms, child protection services, aged care homes, prisons, and courtrooms, frontline workers are being asked to participate in practices that violate their ethical commitments. They are silenced for speaking up, punished for acting with integrity, or made complicit in harm they cannot prevent. The result is a rupture—not just psychological, but moral.

Reframing the Landscape of Moral Injury

While much of the early scholarship on moral injury rightly focused on military veterans, it has left civilian contexts underexamined. The International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work (Denborough, 2021) offered a compelling framework for moral repair, introducing narrative practices like re-authoring, re-membering, and collective witnessing. However, its application remains largely military-centric.

The Moral Injury Centre builds on this foundation and extends it into the systems where moral injury is now epidemic:

• Child protection
• Youth justice
• Mental health and crisis care
• Emergency services
• Education
• Aged care
• Human rights and social work
• Whistleblowing and institutional betrayal

These are not “adjacent” to moral injury. They are its current epicentres.

A Narrative, Not Diagnostic, Approach

Although moral injury is increasingly recognised in compensation claims and occupational health frameworks, it is not yet formally coded as a psychiatric diagnosis. We caution against the rush to clinicalise what is, at its heart, a relational, ethical, and social wound.

Our approach resists both medicalisation and moralisation. We are not interested in redemption arcs, religious confessions, or abstract resilience training. We are interested in story as an act of moral repair because story:

• Validates fidelity to one’s ethics, even when those ethics have been punished or silenced
• Creates space for double listening: honouring both the harm done and the values upheld
• Enables collective witnessing, without admiration or judgement
• Rebuilds identity after rupture, not through forgiveness, but through meaning

Our Commitments

• We honour those who are harmed not because they failed, but because they stayed faithful to what mattered.
• We do not pathologise moral distress. We contextualise it.
• We do not offer spiritual salvation. We offer language, scaffolding, and solidarity.
• We believe that narrative work is not just a therapeutic act—it is an ethical one.

What We Do

• Narrative Interview Series: Real stories from frontline professionals, exploring the lived experience of moral injury across sectors
• Ethical Witnessing Circles: Facilitated narrative spaces for communalising grief and reasserting values
• Training & Consultation: Narrative-informed education for teams, leaders, and services
• Advocacy & Research: Contributions to the growing field of moral injury beyond military frames

A Final Word

We do not believe that healing comes from being told to move on, be resilient, or forgive what remains unforgivable.
We believe healing begins when someone says:
“What you felt was real. What you did mattered. You were not the only one.”