Introduction to violence at work |
| [ Violence at work ] |
Violence at work is an issue who’s time has come.
Violence is rapidly becoming an everyday reality for many workers, from bus drivers to teachers, bank security personnel, nurses and air crews faced with mounting cases of air rage among passengers. But shrouding it in silence and secrecy is counter-productive.
Many remedies exist, including security measures, surveillance, organizational solutions and the training of staff in how best to diffuse potentially violent situations. In most cases, these remedies are extremely cost-effective in terms of reduced medical and personnel costs and improved performance. But they can only be applied effectively once the problem has been acknowledged and brought out into the open.
Experience in this and allied fields strongly suggests that the most effective solutions are obtained when the issue is addressed by an active partnership of all the actors concerned.
Governments, trade unions and employers are increasingly worried by what is emerging as a major workplace concern. The response at the national and international levels is taking shape. The European Commission is analysing the action to be taken for the prevention of workplace violence in the European Union as part of its current programme on safety, hygiene and health at work. All around the world, further surveys and studies are being carried out to identify the main problem areas. Innovative experiments are underway to assess the feasibility and effectiveness of different solutions to the problem. However, the new information and ideas resulting from these initiatives are only now starting to become available.
This introduction to violence at work is intended to provide brief answers to a number of questions. These include: How great a problem is violence at work? What forms does it take? Which sectors and occupations are most affected? To what extent are women particularly vulnerable, with special reference to sexual harassment? What is the cost of violence at work to the individual, the company and society? Do we understand why violence at work happens?
The workplace in general has traditionally been viewed as a relatively benign and violence-free environment. But a series of recent tragedies, and particularly the shootings at Dunblane, Port Arthur and at Thurston High School in 1998, have helped to focus international attention on violence at work. At the same time, understanding has grown that violence at work is not just an episodic, individual problem, but a structural, strategic issue rooted in wider social economic, organizational and cultural factors.
A number of examples can assist in illustrating the scope, dimensions and types of violence associated with workplaces in many parts of the world:
For fuller information on all of the above, including the sources for the figures provided, please see the ILO publication Violence at work.
Another very important source of information concerning the magnitude of the problem of violence at work is the International Crime Victim Survey (ICVS), a multinational comparative research exercise which has so far involved more than 50 countries in all regions. The survey is coordinated by an International Working Group composed of representatives of the Ministry of Justice of the Netherlands, the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI) and the Home Office of the United Kingdom. The 1996 ICVS questionnaire included for the first time reference to victimization at the workplace.
ICVS – Prevalence rates of victimisation at the workplaceby type of incident, gender and region, 1996 (percentage)
[IVCS survey. The detailed information about the ICVS and its results on which this is based was generously supplied by UNICRI.] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
For an in-depth analysis of the results of the ICVS in relation to violence at the workplace, including factors which may have distorted the data, please refer once again to the ILO’s report Violence at work, which also reviews national sources of data on violence at work.
The range of behaviour which may be included under the general heading of violence at work is very broad. But the borderline of what constitutes acceptable behaviour is often vague and cultural attitudes to what amounts to violence are so diverse that it is a very complex matter to define violence at work.
In practice, violence at the workplace may take the form of a wide variety of types of often overlapping behaviour, including non-physical or psychological violence.
Violence may also consist of repeated actions which, by themselves may be relatively minor, but which can cumulatively come to constitute serious forms of violence such as sexual harassment, bullying or mobbing.
Although a single incident can suffice, sexual harassment often consists of repeated unwelcome, unreciprocated and imposed action which may have a very severe effect on the victim. Sexual harassment may include touching, remarks, looks, attitudes, jokes or the use of sexually oriented language, allusions to a person’s private life, references to sexual orientation, innuendos with a sexual connotation, remarks about dress or figure, or the persistent leering at a person or a part of her/his body.
Workplace bullying constitutes offensive behaviour through vindictive, cruel, malicious or humiliating attempts to undermine an individual or groups of employees. Such persistently negative attacks on their personal and professional performance are typically unpredictable, irrational and unfair.
In recent years, reports have been increasing of another form of systematic collective violence. This involves ganging-up on or mobbing an employee and subjecting her or him to psychological harassment, for example by means of continuous negative remarks or criticism, isolation, spreading gossip or ridiculing the person concerned. Although such practices might on the surface appear to be minor single actions, they can have a very serious effect. It has been estimated, for example, that about 10-15 per cent of suicides in Sweden each year have this type of background.
While no occupation is immune, violence at work tends to be more of a risk in certain occupations than in others. Health care is prominent among the sectors which are at high risk. In particular, workers who perform certain types of task appear to be at special risk. These tasks include:
Automation, subcontracting, teleworking, networking and self-employment are leading to a rise in the numbers of people working alone. Although working alone is not automatically more dangerous than other employment, in some situations it involves a higher than average risk of violence.
For example, lone workers in small shops, gas stations and kiosks are often seenas easy targets by aggressors. In the United States, gas station workers rank fourth among the occupations most exposed to homicide. Cleaners, maintenance or repair staff and others who work alone outside normal hours are at special risk of suffering physical and sexual attacks. Of lone workers, taxi drivers are at the greatest risk of violence in many countries. Night-time is the highest risk period, and as in other occupations, customer intoxication appears to play a role in precipitating violence. A 1990 Australian study of taxi drivers found that they run a 28 times greater risk than workers at large of non-sexual assault and an almost 67 times greater risk of robbery.
Several factors appear to increase a workers’ risk of suffering violent treatment at the workplace. Chief among these are sex, age and precarious employment.
Several surveys appear to confirm the vulnerability of younger workers to violent victimization at the workplace. This finding would appear to emphasize the importance of experience in dealing with violent situations. Previous experience enables employees to react more wisely and behave with more self-confidence than inexperienced staff. This may in turn reduce the likelihood of violence occurring.
In the United Kingdom, for example, staff aged 18 to 30 working on the London Underground have a higher probability of becoming victims of assault than older staff.
A 1996 European Union survey, based on 15,800 interviews in its 15 Member States, showed that 4 per cent of workers (6 million) had been subjected to physical violence in the preceding year; 2 per cent (3 million workers) to sexual harassment; and 8 per cent (12 million workers) to intimidation and bullying. Most important, the data show the close connection between precarious work, gender, youth and sectors at special risk. By way of illustration, as shown in the table below, a young woman with a precarious job in the hotel and catering industry is likely to be many times more exposed to the risk of sexual harassment than average.
Many studies show that women are at particular risk of violence, both inside and outside the workplace. For example, over 50 per cent of women interviewed in a Canadian survey in 1993 stated that they had experienced physical or sexual attacks, 18 per cent of which had resulted in physical injury. Data from Sweden also shows women to be more at risk of workplace injuries caused by violence than their male colleagues.
Why are women at high risk of violent behaviour in the workplace? In the first place, women are concentrated in many of the high-risk occupations, particularly as teachers, social workers, nurses and other health-care workers, as well as in banks and shops. The continued segregation of women in low-paid and low status jobs, while men predominate in better-paid, higher status jobs and supervisory positions, also contributes to the problem. Nevertheless, men tend to be at greater risk of physical assault, while women are particularly vulnerable to incidents of a sexual nature.
Many national surveys have found that anything between 40 and over 90 per cent of the women questioned have suffered some form of sexual harassment during the course of their working lives. Many governments, employers and workers started to realise the scope of sexual harassment as a workplace problem some time before becoming aware of the issue of violence at work. More studies have therefore been undertaken on sexual harassment and have documented more fully its incidence and the manner in which it can affect the work performance, career opportunities and mental and physical state of women workers.
In many cases, action has also been taken against sexual harassment at the national and enterprise levels. This ranges from undertaking studies to increasing awareness and, in a number of cases, adopting specific legislation.
Like a stone thrown into water, violence at work not only has an immediate effect on the victim, but also expands in progressively larger ripples, affecting other people directly or indirectly, as well as the enterprise and the community.
However, it is only recently that experts have started to try and quantify the multiple and massive costs of workplace violence. In the United States, crime victimization occurring at the workplace has been estimated to cost approximately 1.8 million lost working days each year. In Germany, the total cost of mobbing has been estimated at 2.5 billion marks per year.
The following estimates give some indication of the magnitude of the cost of workplace violence:
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The impact and cost of violence at work needs to be considered at a number of different levels:
The ILO has recently sponsored new analytical work on the costs of violence and bullying at work and the benefits of a violence and stress-free working environment. For a brief overview of this work, see The cost of violence and bullying at work.
There is a strong and natural desire among most citizens to seek simple explanations and solutions to the violence which may be gripping their society and threatening "the way decent people live". The media are often the source of such explanations and convey lasting impressions of the types of people responsible for such violence. These impressions are often dominated by images of disgruntled employees, angry spouses or unhappy, desperate, often psychiatrically impaired people venting their anger on colleagues at the workplace. These images affect public and official perceptions of violence and the policies which are adopted to address it.
Indeed, much of the current literature on the prevention of workplace violence reflects this approach and consists of the development of pre-employment tests to screen out and exclude potentially violent employees, combined with profiles to identify current workers who might become violent and measures to deal with violence when it occurs.
Measures of this type, as well as broader measures to restrict access to firearms, may well assist in reducing the incidence of violence at the workplace and in the wider community. They therefore deserve careful consideration. But it should also be realized that they are measures which address limited symptoms of an extremely complex and diverse problem which defies either an easy explanation or solution.
Recognition and understanding of the variety and complexity of the factors that contribute to violence at work is a vital precursor to any effective prevention and control programmes.
Violence, or aggression, is deeply ingrained in the behavioural repertoire of humans. It seems originally to have served as an adaptive mechanism necessary for the survival of the species. However, it does not occur randomly across the human species, nor does it occur evenly throughout any given society. National homicide rates, for example (as recorded by UNICRI based on data from the 1995 United Nations Survey of Crime Trends and Operation of Criminal Justice Systems), vary between over 80 per 100,000 inhabitants to under one per 100,000 inhabitants, depending on the country concerned.
Bearing in mind that the risk of violence depends on the interaction of a range of factors, the following have been identified as the most significant:
In terms of long-term strategies to tackle the general problem of violence in any society, the above list shows that the most significant positive outcomes are likely to be achieved through a concentration on child development programmes linked to the family, as well as measures to deal with the range of cultural factors associated with violence.
However, it will undoubtedly take time for the benefits of such strategies and measures to have a widespread impact. In the meantime, there are many ways in which positive micro-level change can be achieved within a particular society and in the workplaces of that society. Such measures need to be based on a sound understanding of the interactions which generate violence. The following table should help in determining the complex interactions which may give rise to violence at work. [Source: New modell prepared by Chappell and Di Martino, based on Poyner and Warne: Preventing violence to staff, London, Health and Safety Executive, 1988]
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