Mark Smith is Professor of Social Work at the University of Dundee. He has a practice background in residential child care and through that developed an interest in ideas of care as an everyday humanistic activity. For the past seven years, he and his family have fostered an unaccompanied asylum-seeking young man (now a refugee) and through that have close contact with other young refugees. All of these have had experiences that would be considered traumatic. However, none of them show any signs of being traumatised. With colleagues, Mark has published critiques of current conceptual assumptions about trauma. He will outline some of these critiques and apply them to his experiences of helping young refugees.