Workplace violence

Violence at work - Preface

Long ignored, denied or considered to be a harsh reality which just has to be accepted as part of life, it is only recently that violence at work has started to receive the attention that it deserves as a serious safety and health hazard which has a high cost for victims and enterprise performance alike.

While many people were of course aware of the existence of violence at work, few voiced their concern or considered it a specific workplace issue. When the ILO published the first edition of its report on Violence at work in 1998, it obviously struck a deep chord. Horrific, but seemingly isolated incidents, such as the shootings at Dunblane Primary School in Scotland and at the Port Arthur Historic Site in Australia, as well as increasingly frequent media reports of violence, for example on public transport, are now beginning to be seen as part of a wider and disturbing pattern.

A second edition of the ILO’s report appeared in 2000, amid growing attention and awareness of this alarming phenomenon worldwide. Fresh information is now emerging which shows that what we see is only the tip of the iceberg: the real size of the problem is still largely unknown. The enormous cost of violence at work for the individual, the workplace and the community at large is also becoming progressively more apparent.

Violence at work - A major workplace problem

It is not often realized just how much of a problem violence at work really is. But the figures speak for themselves:

in the United States, nearly 1,000 workers are murdered on the job every year - workplace homicide is the leading cause of death at work for women and the second leading cause for men (after traffic accidents);

a recent survey in South Africa showed that nearly 80 per cent of respondents had experienced hostile behaviour at the workplace during their working life;

acts of violence against public transport personnel have been rising rapidly in France, with over 2,000 attacks reported in 1998 on the staff of the Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens (RATP);

in Germany, 93 per cent of the women questioned had been sexually harassed at the workplace, according to an extensive national survey conducted in 1991 by the Federal Institute of Occupational Health and Safety.

This section on the Internet has been designed to help all the actors concerned to decide on the action to be taken for the prevention of occupational violence or to improve measures which are already being implemented. The official who covers work-related violence at SafeWork is David Gold, Senior Adviser, Psychsocial Factors. Send your reactions and comments on these webpages to the SafeWork Secretariat.

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Updated by AS, approved by JT. Last modification: 16 June 2002.