Social Justice

Responding to family violence: workplace engagement

Monday 9 July 2012
Kairos Catholic Journal

By Denis Fitzgerald,
Catholic Social Services Victoria

THE 2005 Australian Bureau of Statistics Personal Safety Survey found that 17 per cent of women had experienced violence by a current or previous partner since the age of 15. More than a third of these women were pregnant at the time of the violence.

Victoria Police crime data provides another window into this dark side of our community. About 36 per cent of assaults recorded in Victoria in the year to March 2012—14,644 incidents—involved family violence. This equates to 260 incidents per 100,000 of population. It was an increase of 41 per cent on the previous 12 months.

Over the five years from 2007, there was a 36 per cent increase in the rate of family incident reports to Victoria Police, rising in 2011 to 732 per 100,000 population.

These high rates of increase reflect, in part, an increased rate of reporting, but that does not detract from the unacceptably high level of violence that is being reported. These are horrifying numbers, which are only the starting point for a wide range of consequences, including physical and mental health problems, long-term adverse effects on children and, too often, unemployment and homelessness for women.

Catholic Social Services Victoria member organisations have been active for some time in tackling family violence issues, and in particular in assisting women who have experienced family violence. Several members operate refuges for women and children who have no other safe residence options—McAuley Community Services for Women, VincentCare and Good Samaritan Inn each operate such services.

Other members conduct counselling, mediation, education, empowerment and other programs that seek to mitigate the consequences of this violence, and to prevent it.

One of the programs that McAuley has developed is McAuley Works, an employment program designed to help women, including those who have experienced family violence, into the workforce.

On 15 June Joce Bignold, chief executive of McAuley, led a workshop at Catholic Social Services on the role of the workplace in supporting people experiencing family violence. This was the first such session that McAuley and its training partners, en masse, had delivered, and is seen as a precursor to a program that can be offered more widely to employers.

This is important. One estimate is that two-thirds of women who experience family violence are in the workforce. Without recognition of their situation, and without support, the consequences of family violence are likely to include loss of productivity, absenteeism, and lower morale. This is not in the interests of employers, and it is certainly not in the interests of those who have experienced the violence.

Awareness of the prevalence and the consequences of family violence is foundational in developing such a response: in busy workplaces, relevant managers need to be informed in order to respond effectively to family violence matters.

Prevention is clearly the ideal, and awareness helps here too. Awareness of the extent of the problem can empower all of us to stand up against a culture that can sometimes tolerate jokes about sexual violence or violence against women, or that can fail to realise the pervasiveness of its impact on children.

It is not the role of an employer to intervene in personal matters, but there are steps that can be taken to assist those who are experiencing family violence, and thus improve their lives.

Simply mentioning family violence in policies—special leave, employee assistance programs and so on—provides an invitation for staff to raise these issues in the workplace. Ready availability of information about refuges and legal assistance can also be helpful.

When family violence has been raised, there may be supportive steps that the workplace can take. In addition to employee assistance programs and access to special leave, dialogue about suitable hours of work and about safety in the workplace environs can help both employer and employee.

No one workshop will solve an issue such as family violence, but ‘from little things, big things grow’.

Several of the workshop participants were human-resource personnel from larger organisations. Some participants had themselves experienced family violence, and others had engaged with the issues in various professional and personal capacities.

Feedback from this rich body of expertise will help in refining the McAuley program. Further workshops will then follow as part of a broader imperative to help those suffering as a result of family violence and to prevent it happening in the first place.

Denis Fitzgerald is Executive Director, CSSV.