Blog Against Sexual Violence Day
Hosted by Abyss2hope as part of the Day to End Sexual Violence.
Marj at Survivors Can Thrive joins in with a great post on her blog.
This month's focus is on Sexual Violence in the Workplace. While I don't practice in the area of employment law, I do have some basic knowledge about sexual violence in the workplace. As a domestic attorney and a board member for our local battered women's shelter, I get a lot of questions from my corporate clients about helping and protecting employees in abusive situations. The good news is that employers are becoming more aware of this issue and more proactive. Why should employers care?
Health care costs for domestic violence total $4.1 billion dollars each year, with employers typically paying a portion of the costs. For women, homicide was the second leading cause of death on the job in 2003. An estimated one million women are stalked each year in the U.S.,13 and about one-fourth of them report missing work as a result of the stalking, missing an average of eleven days. (In the UK - The impact of domestic violence goes much wider than the victim, with a cost of approximately £3billion pounds per year for UK employers due to lost economic output. It is shocking that one in four women will be affected by domestic violence in their lifetime and one woman is killed every two to three days.)
Those statistics are staggering. I was personally and professionally confronted by this issue recently. I received a call from an old friend late one evening. He and his wife had just been blessed months earlier with a new child. His wife was returning to work part-time and their self-owned business was finally picking up. He had mentioned last time we had met, that he finally had hope that his business would prosper and he would be able to financially care for his employees and family.
That night he called in tears. There had been a shooting at his place of business. A husband, despite the domestic violence restraining order against him, and despite being out on bond for assaulting his wife, came to the business, shot his wife-employee and then himself. All of this occurred in the business and in front of the other employees.
My friend was devastated. He and his wife (the victim's sister) are now raising two additional children. The wife has been forced to quit work in order to care for the four youngsters, and because daycare for three non-school-aged children is more than she can reasonably earn. The company lost several employees due to the incident. Business was closed for several weeks. I'm not sure this small family-owned business will survive. I know my friend and his wife will never live the same life.
My message is this - Be Aware of what is going on around you. Don't take lightly any incidents of violence in the workplace.
More information here
http://www.endabuse.org/workplace/display.php?DocID=33002
http://www.opdv.state.ny.us/workplace/index.html
http://domesticviolenceworkplace.blogspot.com/2006/08/national-sexual-assault-hotline-helps.html
4 comments:
Wow, enola, that is really awful. There seems to be more and more of this violence in places such as work all the time. When I was younger it mostly seemed to happen behind closed doors. Not that any place is appropriate but the added victims here, the witnesses, makes it all the crazier.
Thanks for helping raise awareness on this issue!
Enola, your story is a reminder for me about why prevention is so important and why events like BASV day blogging are so important.
Many lives didn't have to be lost.
Wow, what an excellent, informative article. Great job, Enola! Thanks for participating in BASV Day!
There are SO MANY reasons why raising this type of awareness is so important.
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