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Business must face up to domestic violence

Author: Author: By Elizabeth Broderick, Sex Discrimination Commissioner at the Australian Human Rights Commission

Published in The Drum, 8 December 2011

It is halfway through the 16 Days of Activism to End Violence Against Women and it is time we realised domestic violence has ramifications in the workplace.

It is time business geared itself up to meet this challenge.

Since Federation, the three 'enfants terrible' of social problems affecting the daily lives of many Australians have been gender bias, mental illness, and domestic violence. They are interrelated and the primary victims across all three have been women.

Until recently, Australian business leaders held the view that these were solely matters for public institutions, or best dealt with in the privacy of the home. After all, the orthodox view of corporate social responsibility from the 1980s was best expressed by the late Milton Friedman, when he said "business has no other corporate social responsibility (CSR) than to make the largest profit it can". This 'take no prisoners' approach excluded any real focus of attention on social issues by workplace leaders, outside of certain acts of corporate philanthropy. Fortunately, those CSR attitudes have changed dramatically in the last 15 years. Corporations are now very conscious of their relationships to the community and explicitly manage their CSR impacts.

Business perspectives on gender bias and mental health have changed over time, but recognition of domestic violence, or DV, as a business challenge has been slow to follow. Nevertheless, DV data and its relationship to our working lives is just as important to productivity and fairness on the job as the other two.

With gender bias, the simple facts are that men represent 50 per cent of the population but have had their foot on 90 per cent of the top executive and board positions since WWII. Notwithstanding that, recent research has shown mixed-gender teams outperform single-gender outfits. Young women are now roaring into the workforce looking for lifetime careers after graduating from tertiary institutions at greater rates, and often with better marks, than their male counterparts.

With mental health, research shows that, in Australia, not only does one adult in five have a mental health problem each year, and almost one in two have a mental health problem over a lifetime, but these are business issues capable of being addressed positively.

Moreover, it's now widely accepted that all workers can be trained and equipped to spot mental health problems in others and to call in specialist help when needed. Archaic business leadership views, which dictated we shouldn't get involved with mental illness by letting it through the factory door, have gone. It is already inside. Mental health issues are recognised as being a daily presence in all our workplaces and requiring proactive attention as part of our fundamental duty of care.

Domestic violence, on the other hand, continues to produce a greater business cringe response than the other two. Nevertheless, this DV challenge requires a similar head-on response as the other two, and the significance of the issue to be outed.

In 2005, the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported that about 1.2 million women had, from the age of 15, experienced domestic or family violence at the hands of a male partner. Many of these women suffer from mental health problems. At least 800,000 of these female victims are employed. That's about one in six female workers in this country. A few years ago, VicHealth identified DV as the major cause of disability and illness in Victorian women aged 15-44 years.

An unfortunate myth with DV is that this is just a woman's problem, which is patently false. For every working woman who is a victim of DV, there is a male perpetrator who is most likely also going to work somewhere each day. Allowing for similar rates of DV amongst same-sex and heterosexual couples, this means at least one in six workers are either DV victims or perpetrators. As well as being highly correlated with mental health issues for both genders, DV is also correlated with workplace bullying and sexual harassment of women by men - two prime causes of sustained gender bias at work.

The overall economic cost of DV is also high. In 2004, VicHealth noted that the cost of domestic violence to Australian businesses was at more than $500 million per annum. Adjusting for equivalent incidence rates nationally, and economic growth over the last decade, this means the national cost of DV probably sits at $2.5 billion.

So in addition to the annual number of working DV victims being equivalent to eight MCG AFL Grand Final crowds, the annual cost to the nation is approximately one tenth of the amount by which our economy grows each year.

The time has come to recognise DV is also a major workplace problem.

Workplace remedies for all three of these social problems have common features. Recognition of the high rates of incidence and their negative impact on workplace outcomes and on safe and healthy working environments, is one. A need for better behavioural training and support programs for victims and perpetrators is another.

In so many other ways, business has recognised that what occurs in the home can have a profound impact on what happens in the workplace. This is reinforced by the fact that many of today's workplaces can be found in the home. Just as business has been one of the leaders in combating issues such as depression and gender bias, so too can business be one of the leaders in combating domestic violence.

Elizabeth Broderick is Australia's Sex Discrimination Commissioner at the Australian Human Rights Commission and Peter Wilson is the National President of the Australian Human Resources Institute.