Workplaces play an important role in preventing, identifying and responding to IPV. Across the OECD, there are impressive examples of public and private efforts to ensure an effective workplace approach to intimate partner violence, and to improve social and economic outcomes for victim-survivors. Partnerships play an important role: input from victim-survivors and specialist organisations can help to ensure that workplace actions are safe and effective, while social dialogue, workers’ representatives and collective bargaining have also helped to raise awareness of the workplace impacts of violence, and to promote adequate protections for affected workers.
Governments are leveraging a range of policy tools to encourage and support workplace action on intimate partner violence, including measures targeted to firms and workers. Some countries have extended employment protections and entitlements for employees affected by intimate partner violence, with considerable potential to facilitate disclosure and help-seeking, and to support job retention for affected workers. This includes employment protections and rights to flexible work arrangements for workers affected by IPV, paid domestic violence leave entitlements, and employment support for victim-survivors to enter the workforce. The coverage and design of domestic violence leaves varies considerably across countries, with potential implications for access, cost and outcomes. Some countries have also implemented measures targeted at firms, including guidance for employers, good practice certification schemes, professional equality obligations, transparency measures and incentives for employers to recruit victim-survivors.
While too few of these measures have been robustly evaluated, they can provide meaningful benefits. Workplace supports can improve awareness of IPV and connect victim-survivors with valuable information, with some qualitative studies suggesting that effective workplace action can support job retention, at least in the short term. While the long-term impact of domestic violence leaves remains to be seen, early (albeit limited) evaluation of domestic violence leaves suggest important benefits: domestic violence leave has the potential to support job retention and to help address the stigma surrounding IPV, which still keeps too many people from accessing the support that they need. Early evaluation also points to the importance of raising awareness of these entitlements and to building capacity in the workforce to implement them effectively (particularly to ensure adequate privacy measures and to ensure that managers are well-equipped to respond, both of which could help to facilitate take up). It will be important to continue to evaluate the long-term impacts of these leaves, and governments should look to scale up high-quality evaluations of actions to address intimate partner violence, within and beyond the workplace.
Of course, workplace, social protection and employment support must be embedded in the context of an adequately funded, cross-sectoral approach to prevent and address intimate partner violence, extending to and beyond the education, justice, health, employment and social protection sectors. As public sector employers, governments should also look to build capacity amongst frontline workers to address IPV. Co‑operation within and across sectors must remain a priority, with previous OECD work showing that strong integration and co‑ordination of services for victim-survivors are the exception, and not the norm (OECD, 2023[33]). The stakes are high, but so too are the potential benefits: effective public and organisational responses to violence can not only save lives, but they can help stem the extraordinarily high costs of violence to individuals, businesses and economies.