Why supporting victims of domestic violence is an employer’s concern

Soon after the UK gov­ern­ment imposed its first Covid lock­down in March 2020, Sand­hya Iyer, man­ag­ing direc­tor of per­son­nel con­sul­tan­cy The HR Dept, received an unusu­al request from a client.

It had an employ­ee, near­ing the end of her six-month pro­ba­tion, who was strug­gling to do her job to an accept­able stan­dard while work­ing at home. Iyer found this odd, as the per­son in ques­tion had been per­form­ing well until the lock­down. Rather than imme­di­ate­ly start­ing a for­mal review, Iyer spoke to the employ­ee, who revealed that her part­ner was sub­ject­ing her to domes­tic abuse. 

He had been vio­lent, smash­ing elec­tri­cal appli­ances, and he’d even con­fis­cat­ed her lap­top to pre­vent her from work­ing. 

Despite the government’s work-from-home edict, Iyer and her team made a spe­cial case for her to return to HQ. They acti­vat­ed an employ­ee assis­tance pro­gramme, enabling her to access ther­a­py ser­vices from the pri­va­cy of a meet­ing room. 

With the company’s sup­port, the employ­ee was even­tu­al­ly able to leave her abuser and keep her job. 

Domestic violence isn’t just a personal problem

Tak­ing that expe­ri­ence into account – and the belief that even the small­est employ­ers should have a pol­i­cy in place to sup­port vic­tims of domes­tic abuse – The HR Dept part­nered with Sharon Liv­er­more, an ambas­sador for the Employ­ers’ Ini­tia­tive on Domes­tic Abuse. Livermore’s pre­vi­ous employ­er had made her take five days’ annu­al leave to attend the tri­al of her abu­sive for­mer part­ner. 

In March 2021, ‘Sharon’s pol­i­cy’ was pub­lished as a guide for UK employ­ers of all sizes. The first thing the doc­u­ment does, Iyer says, is to make employ­ers aware that domes­tic vio­lence has a sig­nif­i­cant impact at work too.

And, since the pan­dem­ic brought the mass con­ver­gence of home and work lives, more busi­ness­es are recog­nis­ing the part they have to play in both recog­nis­ing and tack­ling domes­tic vio­lence. In the 12 months to March 2021, the num­ber of domes­tic abuse inci­dents record­ed by the police in Eng­land and Wales increased by 6% year on year, end­ing a long-term down­ward trend. The BBC brand­ed the upsurge an “epi­dem­ic beneath the pan­dem­ic”. 

Iyer explains: “This is about hav­ing a pol­i­cy that encour­ages employ­ees to come for­ward to their employ­ers and say: ‘I have this prob­lem. Could you please help me?’ We have to fig­ure out how to sup­port these peo­ple in a way that doesn’t treat their cas­es like a nor­mal per­for­mance mat­ter. It’s almost giv­ing them the ben­e­fit of being treat­ed as a pro­tect­ed char­ac­ter­is­tic.” 

Support for victims as a growing voluntary corporate movement

Cor­po­rate poli­cies on domes­tic abuse should be as com­mon as work­place health and safe­ty guide­lines, espe­cial­ly giv­en the rise of remote work­ing. So says Catrin Lewis, head of glob­al engage­ment and com­mu­ni­ca­tions at Reward Gate­way. Hav­ing worked at the employ­ee engage­ment plat­form for a decade, she has expand­ed her role over the past two years to become the firm’s main point of con­tact under its sup­port pol­i­cy for vic­tims of domes­tic abuse. 

Cre­at­ed in May 2020, this com­pre­hen­sive pack­age includes paid leave for vic­tims to seek legal advice and finan­cial sup­port to cov­er those expens­es as well as the costs of secur­ing new accom­mo­da­tion. Reward Gateway’s move is in line with a grow­ing vol­un­tary cor­po­rate move­ment in the UK, which has seen big firms such as Voda­fone take the lead by offer­ing paid leave to abuse vic­tims. 

Gov­ern­ments in oth­er juris­dic­tions, mean­while, have been leg­is­lat­ing to ensure that such sup­port is giv­en. In the US, for instance, Mis­souri became the 35th state to oblige employ­ers to pro­vide a min­i­mum peri­od of unpaid leave to vic­tims. The Aus­tralian gov­ern­ment is offer­ing paid sup­port, with activist groups call­ing for statu­to­ry sup­port from employ­ers too. New Zealand man­dat­ed paid leave for vic­tims of domes­tic abuse back in 2018. 

“This goes hand in hand with being a respon­si­ble busi­ness and help­ing to sup­port local ser­vices, which are under mas­sive strain, as a lot of the bud­gets have been cut for char­i­ties that focus on this kind of thing,” Lewis says. “So what can your busi­ness do to give back and lend its sup­port?”

She adds that employ­ers can also make a dif­fer­ence by act­ing as a less intim­i­dat­ing alter­na­tive to the police. Lewis is speak­ing from expe­ri­ence, hav­ing worked for near­ly three years as an enquiry offi­cer with Thames Val­ley Police.

“Some peo­ple might not con­nect with a uni­form or feel that they can trust it. But, if you have a good man­ag­er and employ­er, they can kind of hold your hand through the process,” she says. 

Work may also be the only space in which a vic­tim feels safe enough to speak up about their expe­ri­ences, espe­cial­ly if they are being mon­i­tored by their abuser in oth­er areas of their life.

Contemplating the worst-case scenario

Just because the UK’s Covid restric­tions have eased, it won’t nec­es­sar­i­ly lead to a decline in the num­ber of abuse cas­es, Lewis warns.

“It’s not some­thing that tends to go away in a rela­tion­ship once it’s been there. And, if the num­bers stay up, there won’t be enough sup­port, so peo­ple in this sit­u­a­tion will be wait­ing a long time for help,” she pre­dicts. “We want­ed to remove any fric­tion, help them get to the front of that queue and pay for legal sup­port. It’s not a lot of mon­ey for us as a busi­ness, but it is some­thing that would be huge­ly impact­ful for any­one who needs it.”

Lewis and her team are all too aware of the impact of domes­tic vio­lence on the vic­tims’ well­be­ing and per­for­mance at work. They also have the worst-case sce­nario in mind.

“If one of your employ­ees were to die as the result of domes­tic vio­lence”, she says, “what impact would that have on your com­pa­ny?”