How does domestic violence spill over into the workplace?
Victims report that abuse perpetrators are invading the workplace, especially with stalking behavior like threatening telephone calls, e-mails, following the victim to work, and hanging around the office. Oftentimes other employees witness these events and have concerns for their own safety. So worker productivity is severely affected. By the way, we followed up the survey with a conference on this issue with local and national business leaders. One woman I talked to told me that her husband would come to the office angry and her co-workers would go outside and try to calm him down. That kind of thing gives me the shivers. There’s no worse place to be than in the middle of a domestic-violence situation. What should business owners do about situations like the one you describe? Most of the time, our survey showed, the employer isn’t even directly aware of the domestic violence. Most respondents — 82% — said they had not disclosed the problem to a supervisor; 45% said they hadn’t discl
