The backbone and the Achilles’ heel: rethinking masculinity in policing

Rachel Rogers recently conducted doctoral research into policing culture and male officer mental health. As a psychologist working clinically with police officers for many years she presents her findings in this overview.

Policing’s masculine code gives the service its steadiness, camaraderie and bias for action. It also narrows the pathway to care when this strength is defined as never bending. Drawing on my doctoral research with UK male officers this piece argues for a new honour code: credible confidentiality, culturally competent care, restored safe spaces, and language that aligns help‑seeking with operational strategy.

Holding the Line: The spine of masculinity from boyhood to brotherhood

From the playground to the parade ground, boys and men learn an elegant workaround; you can’t make feelings disappear so keep them tidy. Control them, contain them, convert them into humour or action. Over time, this can become the spine of masculinity; quiet, upright, and trained to hold the line without flinching.

Early social lessons like these are part protection and part performance and are perfectly amplified in high‑stress, hypermasculine professions. Policing demands a level of emotional detachment that is operationally sound, however, when this detachment hardens into identity, the pathway to later care narrows.

Metaphorically, policing asks men to pick up a sword and a shield and hold them with honour. The sword is purpose; confront danger, act decisively and protect the vulnerable. The shield is restraint; control emotion, stay calm, absorb impact so others don’t have to. To be both weapon and armour is noble, necessary and, at its best, deeply masculine; disciplined, protective, reliable. In my clinical work, I’ve seen what happens when that armour never comes off, and in my research, I was able to ethically capture officers’ words and experiences.

The sword and the shield (why the backbone matters)

Many male officers choose policing as a vocation. In these interviews, they spoke about a “moral compass” and “a calling” essentially a language of service, meaning and duty. Those ideals are not the problem; they are the reason policing works. Courage, loyalty and composure steady teams in chaos and help officers hold the line when most people would step back. Pride in craft and quiet reliability, these are legitimate strengths of the masculine script.

The difficulty begins when those strengths must be displayed without relief. When the sword never leaves the hand and the shield never lowers, weight accumulates. Over long careers, “being the dependable one” can slide into over‑functioning and isolation; the same vigilance that keeps scenes safe can keep support at arm’s length.

Masculinity, then, is both the backbone and the Achilles’ heel of policing: the trait that makes the work possible, and the trap that makes care harder to reach.

“You fall on your sword”, when help looks like dishonour

One phrase I heard was not “you get help” but “you fall on your sword” a metaphor of the self‑sacrifice and shame felt by asking for support. Some even joked darkly about “dying by your sword”; a gallows‑humour nod to the ultimate cost of silence. That language matters. It signals that the very code that powers the service; loyalty, endurance and reliability can turn inward and become a barrier to care.

This isn’t just semantics. Officers fear being seen as “less of an officer” or being branded with phrases like “sick, lame or lazy.” They also know the career consequences that can follow disclosure: removal from specialist roles, failed promotion, “having your card marked” or “hit with the shitty stick”.

Informal sanctions can count as much as formal ones: being left out of briefings, quietly reassigned, or watched more closely than before. In a culture that prizes reliability, help‑seeking can look like dishonour, like making someone else carry your shield.

The result? Delayed help seeking. Many wait until distress breaches containment, by which point symptoms are severe and risks escalate. In some cases, that delay ends in crisis. When help‑seeking feels like falling, or dying, on your sword, men will wait until the pain of staying silent outweighs the cost of speaking, but when they do, the system often fails to meet them.

What the armour hides

Chronic over‑control doesn’t make trauma disappear, it displaces it. When officers can’t show a “chink in the armour,” the pressure finds other exits. In this research, men spoke of coping through “alcohol, sloth and comfort eating,” “tattoos” and “other forms of pain”, and often “banter” as a gateway in. Humour, often dark, sometimes shocking wasn’t just entertainment; it was a pressure valve. As one officer put it “You have a lot of dark humour; bad jokes could get you sacked but that’s a coping mechanism.”

These strategies make sense in context. Emotional detachment is operationally sound until it becomes identity, at which point help‑seeking becomes harder. When care is culturally coded as weakness, men reach instead for outlets that sit more comfortably within the masculine script: overwork, risk, alcohol, gallows humour. In policing, those outlets are amplified by shift work, fatigue, and the loss of informal peer spaces once provided by canteens and social clubs as the everyday containers where stress could drain off without paperwork or performance plans.

None of this is about bad character. It’s about a bad fit between social scripts, job demands and available supports. That said, understanding context does not mean condoning harmful choices or heinous behaviour, accountability matters, but so does accuracy. Much of what is labelled as “bad behaviour” is, in reality, a predictable endpoint of shame, isolation, chronic emotional and physiological dysregulation, and poor psychoeducation.

We have to start from a simple reframing; many officers are floored, not flawed and when they’re down, it’s not their character that needs fixing, the system needs to know how to help them back up.

The cost of silence

When officers finally speak up, the response they meet can feel like punishment. Many described being “ripped away from all security,” “taken offline,” or parked in “dead man’s shoes.” Others spoke of being sent to the “broken biscuit barrel”; a holding space for those deemed unfit for frontline work. These measures may be intended as safeguards, but they often land as sanctions, reinforcing the belief that disclosure equals career damage.

This isn’t paranoia; it’s a nationwide pattern. Organisational stigma and inconsistent processes amplify fear and delay help‑seeking. Officers worry about confidentiality, about gossip, and about being judged as unreliable. One summed it up “You’re seen as a resource, a number… expected to do the job, no matter how traumatic.”

When the culture prizes stoicism and the system penalise vulnerability, silence becomes a survival strategy, until it isn’t.

Meanwhile, the organisation projects a different image: posters, email banners, “mental health champions.” Officers called this “window dressing” and “lip service” which creates a gap between rhetoric and reality breeding cynicism and anger “you file it all under B for Bullshit”. This disconnect deepens moral injury; men who gave everything to a service they believed was a family, only to feel abandoned when they needed it most. That betrayal doesn’t just hurt individuals; it corrodes trust, retention and operational effectiveness.

Sharpen the right edge of the ideology sword

If masculinity is policing’s backbone and its Achilles’ heel, the answer isn’t to limp on but to stop and support it. Honour, courage and composure remain essential, but they must coexist with repair, rest and recalibration. A sword that never leaves the hand becomes a liability; armour that never flexes will eventually crack. The future of policing depends on a culture where strength includes the capacity to bend without breaking.

According to the officers in this research, three starting points for this should include:

Credible confidentiality and psychological safety.

Trust is the currency of help‑seeking. Officers need absolute clarity on what stays private and what doesn’t. That means clean firewalls between clinical care and discipline, written explanations of limits at the point of access, and anonymised reporting to the organisation. When trust is opaque, help will be late, if ever.

Help‑seeking works best when framed as operational readiness, not personal failure.

Culturally competent, coordinated care.

Support must be more than symbolic, it must be structured, responsive, and rooted in the realities of the job. Disclosure is only the first step, and it often comes after a long internal battle so what follows must be clear, timely, and effective. Services are under resourced, but that cannot excuse rigid systems that clash with operational life. Appointments must flex around shift patterns, and care must extend beyond a standard six-session model, especially when trauma is layered and longstanding. This jigsaw of help should never come at the expense of the officer who has already wrestled with the decision to speak. Therapy must be tailored, not templated by simply parachuting generic therapy into specialist worlds and expecting it to land well. This means cultural competence in the clinic; an understanding of moral injuries, decision fatigue, straight talking and the operational logic behind emotional detachment. Stoicism has a purpose; without it, officers would be exposed and vulnerable in environments that demand composure under pressure. That function must be recognised, not pathologised. The goal isn’t to dismantle the identity but to build on it; validate its role, then offer strategies that strengthen.

Replace what was removed in healthy, accessible way

Austerity stripped out informal containers; canteens, gyms, peer spaces, chaplaincy all places that quietly absorbed stress and signposted to care. Admittedly these were not always the best options, and some were disbanded for good reason, but this vacuum was never filled. Civilian initiatives of near‑peer men’s groups show the power of normalisation, but policing needs its own equivalent: safe, credible, culturally matched spaces where officers can decompress without fear of reprisal. This is not to excuse harmful or contentious behaviour, accountability matters of course, as does context.

The resource envelope may be tight, but competence isn’t the issue, most officers know what to do when they’re supported with integrity. What they need is space and permission to act on that knowledge without fear of stigma or systemic barriers. Support should clear the path, not add hurdles but create conditions where asking for help doesn’t feel like weakness, and where recovery is seen as readiness, not risk.

Building Systems That Hold

The strongest structures in the world aren’t rigid; they’re engineered to move. Think of the remarkable architecture built to survive earthquakes: it flexes, absorbs shock, and stays standing because it was designed for stress, not the denial of it.

Policing needs the same principle. We’ve built too many quick brick walls when what we need are dry‑stone walls, solid, layered with grit and able to shift under pressure without collapsing.

Experiencing the inevitable stressors of policing shouldn’t feel like falling on a sword, it should feel like falling into support that is routine, dignified, and expected, because the fight for resilience is as noble as any battle. When help feels like strength, bending becomes power, and armour that bends doesn’t break, it protects.

 

About the author: Rachel Rogers is an experienced, accredited practitioner and an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society. Rachel’s professional background spans the NHS and charitable sectors. Her work has focused on occupational stress and trauma in uniformed and emergency services with the last decade dedicated to the policing charity network. Rachel has led pioneering initiatives, including the UK’s first intensive residential trauma programmes for officers affected by C/PTSD, a model inspired by Dutch best practice and additional specialist training. 

Rachel’s research into police mental health aims to align support systems with the realities of frontline work. She founded Phoenix Trauma Solutions CIC to integrate her research, clinical practice, and lived experience as  as part of a police family.

Category: Wellbeing