Safeguarding women at work? Lessons from Aotearoa New Zealand on effectively implementing domestic violence policies

Abstract

Although domestic violence is increasingly acknowledged as a workplace issue and a gender equality issue, a gap remains in the effective implementation of domestic violence policies in workplaces. The Domestic Violence – Victims Protection Act passed in 2018 in Aotearoa New Zealand was a global landmark for holding workplaces accountable for safeguarding victims through a codification of employer responsibility. While the legislation is a milestone, such moves are nascent compared with other workplace gender equality initiatives. In this article, we assess ‘where we are now’ in relation to domestic violence policy initiatives, arguing that knowledge necessary for successful policy implementation is limited by the historical ‘gender blindness’ of industrial relations scholarship. For successful implementation, scholars and practitioners must understand domestic violence as a public issue embedded in broader patterns of gender inequality, reinforced by a gendered labour market. Drawing upon vignettes of victims’ experiences from empirical data on intimate partner stalking in Aotearoa New Zealand, a research and practice agenda is proposed to consider ‘where to next’ for implementing domestic violence policies. Our agenda proposes recognising domestic violence as a gendered, public issue which blurs boundaries between work, home and society in order to truly safeguard women at work.

Keywords

domestic violence policy gender equality intimate partner violence paid leave women and work

Introduction

Domestic violence (DV) is a gendered experience and a workplace problem that significantly impacts women’s lives.¹ Violence against women² is recognised by the United Nations as one of the most widespread, persistent and devastating human rights violations in our world today and is widely understood as a substantive barrier to achieving gender equality (UN Women, 2018). Promoting gender equality is a critical part of violence prevention (World Health Organisation (WHO), 2009). Aotearoa New Zealand has one of the highest rates of DV in the developed world, with one in three women reporting physical abuse and one in two reporting psychological abuse from an intimate partner in their lifetime (Fanslow and Robinson, 2011). Accordingly, there has been a longstanding organised response to address DV, particularly from trade unions, non-government organisations (NGOs) and grassroots groups, who argue that DV is a collective, rather than individual, issue which requires a coordinated response from all areas of society (Arnold and Ake, 2013; Baird et al., 2014). More recently, workplaces have been recognised by policy makers as a site through which to redress the harms of DV and advance gender equality (International Labour Organization (ILO), 2019).

Yet to date, these nascent moves towards DV policies for the workplace have not been examined in relation to the conditions necessary for their successful implementation. Our main contribution in this article is to develop a research and practice agenda for DV policy implementation through a focus on the Domestic Violence – Victims Protection Act (the Act). The Act, passed in 2018 in Aotearoa New Zealand, was a landmark, not only in this country but globally, for holding workplaces accountable for safeguarding victims of DV through codification of employer responsibility. A next (but more complex) step towards redressing the gendered harms of DV is ensuring effective implementation. To develop an agenda in this direction, we outline how DV has become understood as a workplace gender equality issue and put the Act in the context of other policy initiatives targeting gender (in)equality in the workplace. This narrative forms our assessment of ‘where we are now’ in relation to DV policies. We then project forward to the complexities of enacting such legislation by assessing ‘where to next’ for advancing gender equality.

This article begins by outlining the policy context and our theoretical approach. We then map how DV became situated as a gendered workplace issue. After establishing ‘where we are now’, we turn to the vital question of ‘where to next’ by examining vignettes drawn from an empirical study of intimate partner stalking in Aotearoa New Zealand to understand the complexities of policy implementation through gendered, spatial and temporal lenses. After analysing these insights, we conclude with proposing a future agenda for research and policy to ensure successful implementation of DV policies.

Policy context

The Domestic Violence – Victims Protection Act was passed in Aotearoa New Zealand in 2018. The Act affords victims of DV several employment rights and protections including: 10 days paid leave per year, flexible working arrangements to negotiate changes to work location, hours or duties for up to two months and protection from adverse action. These rights are also afforded for historical cases of DV. An employee is eligible for these entitlements after six months of continuous employment and having worked for an average of 10 hours per week or at least one hour every week for that period of employment. Employers may request proof of DV. If employees have problems accessing these entitlements, they may seek assistance from Employment New Zealand or the Human Rights Commission. Employers face a financial penalty for not having a workplace DV policy and are generally expected to create a work environment that is supportive for victims of violence. The wording of the legislation is deliberately gender-neutral to ensure that all victims of family violence are able to access these entitlements.

The passing of the Act was the result of research and advocacy by trade unions, anti-violence NGOs, academics and business groups (Jury et al., 2017; Kahui et al., 2014; Rayner-Thomas et al., 2014). The legislation did not have bilateral support, however, with the opposition party arguing the economic cost was too high for small–medium businesses (Aigne Roy, 2018). Aotearoa New Zealand is the first industrialised country (and only the second country in the world after the Philippines, which passed similar legislation in 2004) to nationally legislate for paid DV support as a universal employee entitlement. Other industrialised countries are also in the process of negotiating similar entitlements. Australia, for instance, currently offers a National Employment Standard of five days unpaid leave per year and access to flexible working arrangements, but the State of Queensland has introduced similar legislated paid entitlements (covering state and local government employees) as Aotearoa New Zealand. Additionally, the ILO established international standards in the Violence and Harassment Convention 2019 to progress towards violence-free workplaces. The standards mandate members to develop workplace policies on violence and harassment and take affirmative action against gendered violence to make workplaces safe from violence (ILO, 2019).

For employees, paid leave increases their ability to access (sometimes life-saving) support such as healthcare, legal advice or changes in living arrangements, while maintaining the economic security necessary to potentially leave and recover from a violent relationship (de Jonge, 2018; McFerran, 2010). Flexible work allows for an employee’s location and hours to be changed, thereby reducing the risk that an employee will be stalked, harassed, threatened or injured by an abusive partner or ex-partner in the workplace or nearby (Kwesiga et al., 2007). Importantly, legislated universal paid entitlements codifies the responsibility of employers to safeguard victims of violence in their workplaces and formally recognises DV as a barrier to achieving gender equality in the workplace. However, as Cooper and Baird point out, ‘while the formal policy context is important to at least establishing the floor of employee rights, that does not in itself determine the ways in which [policies] are dealt with in practice’ (2015: 580). Gender equality policy initiatives can be ineffective, or even harmful, if employers do not enact these policies in recognition of broader patterns of gender inequality (Cooper and Baird, 2015; Donnelly et al., 2012). DV policies must therefore be implemented in recognition of both the gendered nature of DV and the gendered organisation of working life.

Theoretical framing

Feminist scholars have provided a rich, and often radical, body of work which theorises the connections between gender inequality, economic participation and domestic life. As a starting point, we take inspiration from Mary Wollstonecraft’s powerful treatise, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, which outlines how women are ‘treated as a kind of subordinate being’ (Wollstonecraft, 2019: 10 – originally published 1792) and restricted from fully accessing political, economic and social life. As part of her treatise, Wollstonecraft proposes a revolutionary reimagining of how we conceptualise what is a ‘private’ and ‘public’ issue. Wollstonecraft draws a direct line between the domestic struggles of women for education, economic equality and self-determination to broader political and economic struggles against inequality and tyrannic political rule. As argued in the final pages of her treatise: ‘public virtue is only an aggregate of private’ (Wollstonecraft, 2019: 264). In other words, inequalities in the domestic sphere are refractions of socio-political and economic inequalities. In relation to gender equality, then, ‘private’ and ‘public’ are not static concepts, but ‘ideological markers’ which are ‘indeterminate and shifting, but at the same time connected to identifiable relations of power’ (Boyd 1997: 4). Wollstonecraft’s reimagining of the domestic sphere as central to socio-political and economic struggles can be understood as a shift in the ideological markers of the public and private in relation to industrial, political and social power.

Feminist Industrial Relations (IR) scholars have similarly questioned the ideological markers of ‘public’ and ‘private’. Historically, little attention has been given in IR scholarship to the intersection of the domestic sphere and working life; an oversight which impacts women more acutely (Rubery and Fagan, 1995; Rubery and Hebson, 2018; Wajcman, 2000). The oversight stems from ‘supposedly gender-neutral [IR scholarship which is]… in fact, gender blind’ (Rubery and Fagan, 1995: 210). Accordingly, a gendered analysis in IR scholarship is vital to gain a more holistic understanding of inequalities in the labour market (Holgate et al., 2006; Rubery and Fagan, 1995; Rubery and Hebson, 2018; Wajcman, 2000). Literature in this vein underscores that assumptions about domestic life, such as women being the second wage-earner (Rubery and Fagan, 1995) and primary caregivers (Wajcman, 2000), shapes their workplace experiences. Industrial issues stemming from these assumptions, such as division of labour (Alexander et al., 2014) or pay inequality (Whitehouse and Smith, 2020), have thereby received attention from a gendered perspective. Importantly, there has also been increased focus on ‘the gendered character of work itself’ (Wajcman, 2000: 184) and exploring the blurred intersections between the workplace, family, community and the state (Pocock, 1997). However, issues such as DV, which have received minimal attention in IR scholarship, indicate that assumptions about what constitutes a ‘workplace issue’ continue to be defined by traditional divisions of public and private life. A gendered lens and a reconsideration of private/public issues in relation to political, economic and industrial contexts, therefore, remains crucial to ‘revitalising’ IR scholarship (Rubery and Hebson, 2018).

A gendered lens, and the relation between private and public, have also been central to feminist scholarship about DV. Feminist theorists have underscored that DV ‘is not a private or family matter, rather, it is a deeply embedded social problem that has to be addressed by social change’ (Ali and Naylor, 2013: 612). The ongoing devaluation of women, their experiences and their needs foundational to gender inequality is both a cause and consequence of DV (Ali and Naylor, 2013; Hill, 2019). DV is reified by stereotypes about gender (Hill, 2019), an inadequate public policy context sensitive to women’s issues (Rose, 2015), and gendered labour market inequalities (Jury et al., 2017). An individual woman’s experience of violence, then, is a manifestation of social, political and economic inequalities rather than a private issue. To safeguard women, feminist theorists have therefore argued that DV needs to be recognised as a gendered, public issue that requires industrial, social and public policy level interventions (Ali and Naylor, 2013).

Throughout this article, we consider the ideological markers of the private and the public in relation to both IR scholarship and DV. We take inspiration from Mary Wollstonecraft in proposing that in relation to the rights of women, domestic struggles are, in fact, public struggles and have political, economic and social dimensions. We examine the regulation of DV within the context of the blurred intersections of the workplace, family, community and state, and assert the need for our collective institutions and processes to be driving cross-sector responses to DV. Our analysis of DV policies is situated within the broader gendered industrial context and the operation of (patriarchal) power relations in workplaces and society which shape how gendered interests and industrial issues are understood (Pocock, 1997; Rubery and Hebson, 2018). In doing so, we articulate the need for IR research to reconsider the markers of ‘public’ and ‘private’ and continue to reimagine the place of the ‘domestic’ within industrial issues.

Where are we now? Gender equality, violence and the workplace

DV has not always been viewed as a social issue or a gender equality issue, let alone a workplace issue (Arnold and Ake, 2013; Fineman and Mykitiuk, 1994). How the ideological markers of public and private shifted so that DV became situated among other industrial issues relating to gender (in)equality is therefore significant to understanding the pathway towards successful implementation. Gender inequality in the workplace is an enduring issue in Aotearoa New Zealand as well as globally, despite regulation and public policy action (Williamson et al., 2019). Women remain disproportionately concentrated in part-time and casual employment, the gender pay gap remains entrenched, the use of paid parental leave is highly gendered, unpaid or care labour is unevenly distributed and legal protections for workers experiencing harassment are limited (Williamson et al., 2019). Women’s advancement in the workplace has ‘stalled’ in many countries, including Aotearoa New Zealand, with predictions that equality will not be achieved for nearly another 100 years when all issues impacting women’s equality (such as political participation or education access) are taken into account (World Economic Forum (WEF), 2019).

Establishing DV as a workplace issue

Over the last decade, there has been increased public attention to the impact of violence on women’s working lives, particularly around the issues of bullying and sexual harassment (ILO, 2019; Walden and McFerran, 2014). Such attention has been, in part, spurred by multiple high-profile cases of sexual harassment and the success of the global #MeToo movement (Sen et al., 2018), as well as new reports showing two in five women having experienced sexual harassment at work in the past five years (Australian Human Rights Commission, 2020).

Although DV has been part of conversations about violence in the workplace, it has, overall, received less scholarly, policy and public attention as a gendered workplace issue. One reason for this oversight is related to the conceptualisation of the private and public dimensions of violence against women. DV is inflicted by an intimate partner or family member on a victim, typically with the aim of establishing power and control. This kind of violence manifests in multiple ways, including physical, sexual, emotional, economic, psychological or spiritual abuse (Nichols, 2014). DV is understood to be gendered, in that men’s violence is inflicted on women at higher rates globally (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), 2018), and, crucially, the violence is part of the broader social devaluation of women (Ali and Naylor, 2013; Nichols, 2014). Importantly, the experience of DV varies between women. Other intersecting identities such as sexuality or ethnicity shape the nature of the violence (Ristock, 2011; Te Puni Kōkiri, 2010). DV, then, is a socially situated problem which is embedded in broader cultural attitudes about gender in society (Hill, 2019; Nichols, 2014).

The term ‘domestic violence’ implies that it is restricted to the domestic sphere, i.e. that it is a private issue which occurs only within the household. Feminist researchers have established, however, that DV is a public issue which ‘spills over’ into all areas of life, including the workplace (Hill, 2019; Rayner-Thomas et al., 2016). Reports have documented abusers destroying workplace property such as uniforms; spreading harmful rumours about victims to colleagues or employers; visiting the workplace or the commuting route; calling victims excessively during work hours as a distraction; and preventing victims from attending after-work events and networking (Sanders, 2015; Swanberg et al., 2005). Victims of DV are more likely to be absent through illness or stress-related conditions, experience fear or shame that the violence will become common knowledge in the workplace and have reduced ability to perform well in their job (Swanberg et al., 2005). Victims’ (understandable) reluctance to disclose their situation can also limit their access to support (Wibberley et al., 2018). DV issues may only come to light when an employee faces disciplinary action for high absenteeism or poor performance (McFerran et al., 2013, as cited in Wibberley et al., 2018). Consequently, DV culminates in interrupted work histories, lower incomes, fewer promotion opportunities and concentration in low-skilled, insecure work (Wibberley et al., 2018). DV also incurs a significant economic cost for employers through increased absenteeism, turnover and decreased productivity (Leblanc et al., 2014; O’Leary-Kelly et al., 2008). In Aotearoa New Zealand, DV is estimated to cost employers at least $348 million a year³ (Kahui et al., 2014).

Accordingly, DV is increasingly recognised as a public issue with institutions acknowledging their responsibility for redressing the gendered harms of DV. Trade unions have been particularly active in placing DV on the workplace agenda. In Australia, for example, ‘equality bargaining’ has been an effective instrument to codify protections for victims of DV in collective industrial instruments⁴ (Aeberhard-Hodges and McFerran, 2018; Baird et al., 2014; Williamson and Baird, 2014). Internationally, union activities have included negotiating for DV policies, providing workplace training and information on services and resources, campaigning to improve legislation and services and supporting victims through union delegate action in the workplace (Wibberley et al., 2018). Anti-violence NGOs have also advanced DV as a public issue relevant to workplaces, particularly through sharing victims’ stories and advocacy work (Barrett et al., 2016; Nichols, 2014). DV has, thereby, become established as a workplace gender equality issue.

Industrial responses to DV

Despite the significance of DV for employees and employers, there has been a limited legislative or policy-based response at the workplace level (Swanberg et al., 2012). The vast majority of DV legislation is targeted at criminalising behaviours and affording avenues for protections in the household. The legislative framework reflects dated assumptions about the ‘private’ nature of DV, putting the onus on individuals within family units to prevent harm and on the justice system to intervene. Until very recently, workers subjected to DV had no specific protections or rights; it was left to the discretion of individual employers to provide other types of leave support (e.g. sick leave). However, the new industrial concept of paid DV leave in Aotearoa New Zealand shifts this provision from an optional organisational policy to DV as an industrial issue affecting worker safety and productivity, which requires industrial solutions. As highlighted, the recent ratification of the ILO Convention (ILO, 2019) means that further policies and protections which target violence and harassment in the workplace, including bullying, sexual harassment and DV, will be forthcoming in other jurisdictions.

The landmark legislative response in Aotearoa New Zealand marks an important step towards requiring an industrial response to DV. However, these responses are comparatively recent to other workplace gender equality initiatives. In Australia, for instance, it was not until 2010 that the first workplace rights for victims of DV were developed (Kenna, 2015), and although many workplaces have responded to this call (Baird et al., 2014), Australia still lacks paid federal entitlements. Additionally, the conceptualisation of the public and the private in relation to DV and the workplace continue to reinforce problematic assumptions that DV is a private issue that impacts, but is not part of, the workplace. The entitlements for victims of violence are therefore still in their infancy on a global scale and scholarly work has, understandably, primarily focused on developing legislation or policy rather than implementing it. The next step towards gender equality, then, must come through examining the issues raised through implementing DV policies, particularly in the context of broader patterns of inequality in and beyond the labour market which inform the public, gendered nature of DV.

Vignettes exploring DV

In the remainder of this article, we take the first steps towards examining the complexities involved in successfully implementing DV policies. To achieve our aim, we draw on vignettes from an empirical study about intimate partner stalking conducted in 2019 by the National Collective of Independent Women’s Refuges (NCIWR) in Aotearoa New Zealand. The aim of this study was to understand women’s experiences of intimate partner stalking in order to improve frontline practice. Two primary methods were utilised to develop the data set: an open-ended survey with 518 complete responses and 18 semi-structured interviews. The survey focused on understanding victims’ experiences of intimate partner stalking across five domains: demographics of victims, awareness of stalking behaviour, tactics used, description of stalking experience and assistance sought. All but one survey items were open-ended to capture victims’ experiences. Only the section on ‘tactics used’ was closed multiple-choice to understand the most common tactics used against the victim. The semi-structured nature of the interviews (which were conducted after the survey closed) uncovered an emerging theme in the study of victims’ experience of intimate partner stalking and its connectedness to workplace issues, which was not explored in the survey due to the initial scope of the study. Accordingly, the vignettes reported in this article were selected from the semi-structured interviews, rather than the survey data.

At the end of the survey, participants could opt into a follow-up interview to explore the lived experience of violence and how different dimensions of the victim’s life (e.g. friends, family, workplace, justice system) were implicated in the violence. Thirty potential interviewees came forward and were screened according to their ethnicity, sexuality, age, variation of experience of intimate partner stalking and safety from abusers. Of these, 18 were considered safe and provided diversity across the characteristics. For ethnicity, nine interviewees identified as Māori, eight identified as Pākehā⁵ and one as Asian-European. For sexuality, 2 of the participants identified as queer and the other 16 identified as straight or heterosexual (although all interviewed had been subjected to DV by a cis-man). Ages ranged from 18 to 54 years. The aim of the selection criteria was not necessarily to gather a representative sample, but to explore the diversity of experiences of intimate partner stalking. The interviews ranged from 35 to 90 minutes and were fully transcribed. Interview themes considered the development of the abuse, nature of (and changes to) tactics used over time, the spheres of victims’ life the abuse impacted, assistance sought and outcomes of that assistance. During the data collection process, it became clear that the workplace was an important site for understanding the complexities of the experience of DV for participants. Of the 18 participants interviewed, half identified the workplace as an important arena in which the violence occurred and was perpetuated by the abuser, for violence affecting work capacity and as a site to potentially access support.

The nine vignettes were then reviewed by the researchers. For the purposes of this article, we draw on three illustrative, in-depth vignettes from the interviews which highlighted the diverse ways in which DV can impact women’s experiences at work. The researchers selected three ‘vignettes’ according to similar criteria to the initial interviews, including ethnicity, age and variation in experiences of violence. Given the initial focus of the study and interviews, some details which would have been relevant were not collected, including the type and size of the workplaces and victims’ specific work role. We acknowledge this as a limitation of the data but recognise these vignettes as providing compelling insights of the lived-experience of DV and its connection to the workplace. In our agenda, we highlight the need for future research to extend these preliminary insights. From this data, we examine areas which require more attention from researchers and practitioners in order to successfully implement DV policies in a way that moves towards gender equality.

Analysis: Complexities of DV vignettes

In this section, we map the complexities of policy implementation related to DV as a public, gendered issue. To start our discussion, we present the experiences of three women: Emily, Clare and Ngahuia.⁶

Emily (early 30s, Pākehā)

Emily was relentlessly stalked by her ex-partner and the father of her only daughter. During the five-year relationship, her ex-partner was physically abusive, and although he ‘had always been very obsessive and controlling’, after the relationship ended and she moved out, it ‘became a nightmare’. The abuser would show up at her house, go through her belongings, refuse for her daughter to attend the local school. forcing Emily to travel across the city each morning, and monitor her whereabouts through constant, emotionally manipulative messaging. This lasted two-and-a-half years.

Emily explains that the stalking:

got to the point where I thought ‘I can no longer work out rationally if this man is going to kill me’ … and besides, even if he didn’t, he had controlled my life to the point where I felt guilty for getting up and having breakfast.

The abuse had impacts throughout her life including depleting all her savings to pay for a lawyer, and resulted in her feeling isolated and terrified, which also undermined her self-confidence.

Importantly, the culmination of the abuse in the community and home spilt into Emily’s working life:

It was very, very scary. It was extremely isolating, and it quite honestly got to the point where I couldn’t function anymore. I was struggling to go to work. By that time I was back at work fulltime. I was not eating, I couldn’t sleep and the stress triggers – it just made me unwell to be honest … So life got really, really hard because he was relentless in what he was doing to me, and it was every day, every night, early morning, late at night there was never a time that I could escape it ever.

Clare (mid 20s, Pākehā)

Clare described herself as young and vulnerable when she met her much older partner when she was 23. For the first few months of the relationship, she felt like he was the kind of partner ‘you always wanted and hoped for’. And then the abuse started. For the next two years, he was physically and emotionally abusive. While she tried to leave the relationship several times during that period, she found herself returning but eventually was able to permanently leave the relationship. Although she had left, he did not stop the violence. There were endless messages, calls and small notes left on her car for three years after the relationship. Clare was working during this period and felt that she had to disclose the situation to her employer:

I had to have a conversation with my employer. I was working, I mentioned that he left a note on my car in a public carpark where I used to catch the train … [so I told my employer that] I was scared to come to work … I remember sitting down to have a meeting with my manager … [and] another [man], the health and safety rep who was a male, and we sat down like we are now, [but] the response was ‘if it is not work related then why are we having this conversation?’ I just left work crying.

Clare is still hesitant to ask for workplace support:

The current work that I’m with is really understanding, but it is still the fact you have to have those conversations like this … the burden that carries on years later … Then you have to go into work and carry on as if nothing is happening. You feel like you can’t really function at work but how many times can you have time off work for situations like this?

Most recently her ex-partner started harassing Clare through social media, particularly LinkedIn, which caused her to delete her account and affected her work performance.

Ngahuia (late 30s, Māori)

Before Ngahuia left her relationship after five years, it had not been an abusive relationship. Once she had left, however, her ex-partner ‘set out on a campaign of stalking and harassment that was kind of unprecedented’. The harassment started with him boarding up her house and telling her that there was a bomb hidden inside. Although she got a protection order after this event, ‘he would constantly call, constantly text’. He would come back to the house and smash windows, bang on the door or break in and move things around or leave small innocuous notes just to show he was still there. Ngahuia reported the behaviour to the police, but it was dismissed as fairly minor.

Next came the campaign of stalking and harassment in her workplace, as Ngahuia explains:

[He] turned up at my work posing as a courier. He came into my work which at that time was quite hard to do … No one knew who he was and I just happened to be walking down the corridor and I saw him with a big bunch of flowers dressed in a courier uniform and I said to my colleague ‘you need to get him out of here’ because people knew what had happened … The detectives talked to my boss … because they had found out that my ex had paid someone that I worked with some money to keep tabs on me at work.

The experiences left her feeling scared, violated and unsure who she could trust at work and in the community.

Features of the vignettes

The realities of DV are unique to each individual woman. Nevertheless, there are a number of common features across the three vignettes. First, the women all highlight the importance of the markers of private and public in relation to the various arenas in which the violence takes place, which we term spatial complexity. These arenas included the home, workplace, justice system and community spaces. Second, the vignettes all emphasise that DV is not a one-off incident during a relationship but an experience that ripples throughout a victim’s life. All three vignettes underscore the years of ongoing abuse, emotional stress and economic impacts. We term this temporal complexity. Finally, the abusers and the gendered structures of the justice system, workplaces and society all influenced the experience of violence across the three vignettes. The women’s experience of violence and its aftermath was inescapably gendered, which we term gendered relations. These gendered relations underscore the need to reimagine the place of the domestic within IR. In the following sections, we discuss how each of these features generates layers of complexity which shape how organisations can respond to effectively safeguard women at work and address gender inequality.

Spatial complexity

The conceptualisation of the ideological markers of ‘public’ and ‘private’ continue to inform responses from helping actors. In all three vignettes there was spatial complexity in terms of the arenas in which the violence occurred and in terms of how these arenas were understood. For Emily, the violence was outside the workplace but affected her capacity to work. The violence was on public transport, going to and from work, and in the digital arena related to the workplace for Clare. In Ngahuia’s vignette, DV was in the workplace as well as outside the workplace. The experiences of the three women reflect the broader literature about DV and the workplace which illustrates that violence occurs in, around and outside of the workplace (Macgregor et al., 2019). The spatial complexities are acknowledged by the ILO Convention which recognises work done in the home, the commuting route and after-hours networking events as part of ‘the workplace’ (ILO, 2019). The Act, however, is more ambiguous in its demarcation of ‘public’ working life and ‘private’ home life.

For these women, the lines of public/private were significantly blurred. These interplaying domains, however, were not always recognised by their employers. For Ngahuia, the response of the workplace was helpful and fairly straightforward (although inadequate) as there was a direct invasion of ‘private’ life into the workplace. The violence on the commuting route and online for Clare, however, led to a less helpful response from one of her employers. Her employer and the workplace health and safety representative did not recognise that Clare’s concerns about DV on the way to work and feelings of fear were, in fact, related to the workplace. In this instance, the conceptualisation of ‘public’ and ‘private’ by the employers reinforced the power of the abuser and the power of institutions to determine who should take responsibility for violence. While the ILO Convention supports Clare’s claims, as it recognises violence on the commute as workplace violence (ILO, 2019), under the Act her employers have discretion to question Clare’s experience and ask for proof.

The spatial complexity of DV underscores a number of issues for enacting DV legislation. The burden is on victims to assert their experiences are relevant to the workplace; individual employers hold discretion in this respect. The spatial complexity of DV, in terms of the variety of arenas in which it plays out and how these arenas are conceptualised, demonstrate that this ambiguity (unaccounted for in the Act) can be detrimental to safeguarding women at work. Moreover, the spatial complexity underscores that although DV is considered ‘public’ in some instances, there still remains a lack of recognition of how the private is an aggregate of the public. While the ILO standards offer a stronger basis for policy that recognises this spatial complexity, even the Convention separates out the ‘private’ DV which impacts the ‘public’ workplace.

Temporal complexity

There is a common misconception that DV ends when the victim leaves an abusive relationship (Abrahams, 2010), another aggregate of the ‘private’ assumptions about DV. Indeed, the Act in Aotearoa New Zealand is framed around affording paid leave ‘to allow [victims] to leave their partners, find new homes and protect themselves and their children’ (Aigne Roy, 2018). In reality, however, DV is not a ‘one-off’ incident, but can have long-term impacts on women, affecting their capacity to gain, and maintain, access to housing, healthcare and employment, and other consequences for mental and physical wellbeing (Abrahams, 2010; Crowne et al., 2011; Shoener, 2016). This was evident across all three vignettes. For Ngahuia, the violence did not even begin until after the relationship had ended, and for all three women the violence continued to have extensive impacts for years after their relationships ended.

The longevity of DV therefore has serious implications for the actioning of DV policies and the support required from workplaces, with all three women explaining how the manifestations of violence affected their access to work, capacity to maintain work and ability to perform well in order to advance their careers (Crowne et al., 2011; Lantrip et al., 2015). Employers, therefore, must actively address these long-term negative impacts. This is particularly important as another NCIWR survey of over 500 victims of DV in Aotearoa New Zealand (conducted in 2017) found that more than half the women in violent relationships left full-time employment during the relationship, and were often unable to return once the relationship ended (Jury et al., 2017). Uncertainty about the responses of workplaces and concerns about shame and privacy can also prevent women from disclosing abuse during or after a relationship to their employer (Rayner-Thomas et al., 2016), as Clare emphasises. Although employees are able to make requests based on historical violence, there are limited guidelines on how the 10 days of paid leave may be used to support victims of violence. Given the complexity of disclosure and the long-term impacts of DV, victims may be discouraged from requesting long-term support from employers. Ultimately, the leave to ‘deal’ with DV is only a first step to the kind of support that is necessary to truly safeguard women at work. As DV is related to ongoing social, political, legal and economic inequalities, it has long-term implications for women that stretch beyond the ‘private’.

Gendered relations

DV policies are gendered, even when framed as gender-neutral (McKie, 2008; Phillips, 2006). As McKie (2008: 75) argues, policy is developed in relation to assumptions about gender and reflects understandings about gender relations, even if this is not explicitly named. For employers to effectively implement DV policies, they must be equipped to understand the gender relations named or implied within policy. If we consider the Domestic Violence – Victims Protection Act as an example, we can see that the type of violence named in the Act is couched in gender neutral terms (victims), directs attention towards particular manifestations of violence in the home (domestic) and posits a particular kind of responsibility for workplaces (protection). The legislation, then, implies a certain gendered relationship between workplaces and victims of violence: safeguarding women as the unnamed dependent economic actors impacted by violence that occurs in the household. Despite being progressive, the Act’s framing operates to minimise the relevance of the legislation as addressing a gender equality issue and operates to reify problematic demarcations between public/private.

One primary concern with DV workplace policies is the ‘absent presence’ of abusers in the codification of the violence (McKie, 2008). As a consequence, the Act provides employers with (limited) guidance on how to respond to victims, but not the perpetrators of violence. Ngahuia’s experience of her abuser invading her workplace underscores this oversight. Additionally, a focus on victims can reinforce the misconception that it is the victim’s (woman’s) responsibility to stop the violence by taking action rather than the responsibility of the abuser or institutions (Peters, 2008). If the enactment of the policy by workplaces compounds the focus on victims, it can reinforce existing gendered hierarchies and perpetuate the misconception of DV as a ‘private’ issue to be solved between members of the household. This is particularly true of Clare’s experience in which she was required to disclose and justify her need for workplace support.

Importantly, workplaces themselves have also long been acknowledged to be gendered in ways that privilege men’s needs over women’s needs (Acker, 1990; Wajcman, 2000). The gendered nature of DV thereby can be compounded by gendered structures of the workplace or industries. Studies of economic abuse tactics, for instance, have highlighted that gendered assumptions about women as economic dependants (rather than competent, independent economic actors) contribute to violence and shape the responses of support services (Jury et al., 2017). The Act implies this kind of dependent gendered relation in that workplaces are positioned as acting as a ‘protector’. Furthermore, the legislation does not reflect how workplaces also perpetuate gender inequalities. Emily’s experience of the competing demands of the justice system and caring responsibilities, which left her economically vulnerable and emotionally drained, stresses the multiple gendered realities that intersect to affect women’s access to work in relation to DV. The ILO Convention, while acknowledging the gendered nature of violence, does not recognise the gendered nature of workplaces. These divisions of public workplaces supporting private problems misrecognise how structural economic, social and political inequalities are intertwined with DV. A critical area for development is to deepen our understanding of how institutional structures and gendered workplaces perpetuate the conditions that allow DV to flourish.

Where to next? A research agenda

DV as a workplace and employment relations issue is generally under-researched, even though the workplace is a high-risk area for continued DV (Wibberley et al., 2018). The recognition of DV as a gender equality workplace issue is an important conceptual shift and part of the integration of gendered perspectives into industrial relations. As the legislative provisions in Aotearoa New Zealand represent relatively new legislation and policy in the area of DV, greater understanding is needed on how business gives effect to legislation through policies, procedures and training to achieve the Act’s objectives, and the challenges arising during implementation.

With delegated responsibility to enact legislation in a workplace context, findings from our vignettes draw attention to how the exercise of power and control by employers and the gendered organisation can distort policy implementation. In a decentralised workplace relations context, organisations play a critical role in structuring both procedural and substantive outcomes. Our article highlights the need for deeper organisational understandings of the temporal and spatial complexities of supporting workers who are victims of DV, as well as how organisations may respond through a ‘gendered lens’. As illustrated in the vignettes, the spatial and temporal complexity of DV can exclude victims from support if employers fail to recognise the multiple arenas in which DV occurs and the long-term implications of violence. This issue is particularly crucial as business navigates through the COVID-19 pandemic where ‘work from home’ requirements have collapsed the domains of ‘home’ and ‘work’, meaning that those most vulnerable to DV have been placed at even greater risk (Zwartz, 2020).

Moreover, our vignettes illustrate how DV is inherently a gendered experience, requiring an organisational response through a ‘gendered lens’. The Act also overlooks the variegated experiences of victims with different gender orientations, sexualities and other intersecting identities. Victims in LBGT+ relationships, for instance, may be reluctant to disclose violence out of fear of further discrimination or that their relationship may not be recognised within the framework of DV (Ristock, 2011). These oversights in the legislation are problematic given that workplaces operate in constructs of power and control, which often underplay the gendered character of work and the importance of intersecting identities, and thus require further attention.

At the level of compliance, the Act assumes that organisations are adequately resourced to enact the legislative provisions of paid leave and flexible work, neglecting disparity between organisational settings that may affect protections available for victims of DV (de Jonge, 2018). While larger, corporate and public sector organisations may have broader capacity to give full effect to the legislative provisions, smaller organisations may face difficulty offering paid leave or facilitating requests for flexible work. While our vignettes did not capture organisational type at a fine-grain level, it is possible that differing organisational settings may influence protections for victims. An important area for exploration is also family-owned businesses, where abusers and victims may be significantly economically interdependent. These issues point to the need for greater understanding of organisational resourcing based on the diverse labour market experiences of women, which the Act overlooks. Further research should also draw attention to workplace protections for workers outside of the standard employment relationship, including contractors, seasonal workers, and gig workers.

Beyond the minimum requirements of the Act, more understanding is required of how other collective institutions in the labour market can actively protect workers subjected to DV and facilitate the participation of women in the labour market. As discussed, it is often through the advocacy of trade unions and NGOs that progress has been made in enhancing protections for victims of DV in the workplace. For example, with the increasing feminisation of trade unions, there may also be renewed promise for ‘equality bargaining’ in the area of DV to further enshrine provisions (Williamson and Baird, 2014). As we develop further understanding about the effectiveness of policy enactment at the workplace level, attention should also be afforded to how union delegates can support victims, with limited research in this area to date (Wibberley et al., 2018).

Where to next? Implications for practice

Research already demonstrates that businesses play an important role in keeping victims safe and ensuring women’s ongoing access to work (de Jonge, 2018; Lantrip et al., 2015; Moe and Bell, 2004). There is, however, a risk of depoliticising the issue of DV if it is viewed as an individual employment relationship issue (de Jonge, 2018; Katz et al., 2017). As new legislative provisions emerge in other jurisdictions and international standards are developed, business needs direction on implementing training, policies and procedures to give effect to gender equality objectives. Within jurisdictions, it is important that national frameworks are developed which coordinate violence prevention, particularly through training and resourcing, with reforms needed to support broad-based training and education, especially when introducing a new workplace right and the ensuing responsibilities (Aeberhard-Hodges and McFerran, 2018). Training in workplaces should emphasise the shifts in conceptual understanding of ‘public’ and ‘private’ this article has addressed, underpinned by a gendered and structural understanding of the problem. Previous research has highlighted this as critical, with Cooper and Baird’s (2015) research on accessing flexible working arrangements showing line managers lacked clear understandings of implementing organisational policy prescribed by legislation.

As illustrated in our vignettes, a whole-of-organisation approach is required which drives change at different organisational levels and focuses on achieving different outcomes, not only in terms of compliance, but driving structural change (e.g. establishing formal policy; changing organisational culture). Staff play a key role in identifying areas for change, with colleagues of victims often assisting disclosure and having direct contact with abusers (Rayner-Thomas et al., 2016), as highlighted in Ngahuia’s vignette. Given the temporal complexity of DV, programmes need to move beyond merely responding after a victim has disclosed, to actively identifying the industrial barriers to gender equality which compound DV. An appropriate response requires close coordination across organisational functions. Inadequate cross-functional coordination and organisational barriers can lead to internal inconsistencies in responding to victims (de Jonge, 2018). Such coordination can only be achieved when the workplace structures which reinforce the inequalities of violence (such as non-recognition of blurred home/work life) are recognised and redressed. Trade unions can play a role here in operationalising the legislative provisions in workplaces. Union delegates should be trained on issues involving DV and equipped to pursue DV provisions through collective bargaining and policy development (Wibberley et al., 2018).

As indicated in the research agenda, violence prevention programmes should be tailored to the workplace itself and adapted not only to the diversity of sectors (e.g. government, private sector, small business, family-owned), but also the diversity of workplace types (manual, office, professional, or multiple sites or locations). Greater understanding is needed around the real costs incurred by small businesses in redressing DV over the long-term as well as the strategies that small businesses are using to support their staff. This will be particularly essential in the years of economic recovery following the COVID-19 pandemic as small businesses rebuild. Additionally, urgent attention is required to raise awareness of DV as a workplace health and safety issue. All employers hold a common law duty of care to their employees. However, common law actions often fail to acknowledge the wider social context that gives rise to DV and to adequately address the systemic nature of the problem through the workplace. We therefore need a cultural and institutional shift in the field that has historically focused on physical harm and risk. As part of policy implementation, workplace health and safety regulators should undertake training and education on the nature and impacts of DV to inform their work. Similarly, with COVID-19 highlighting the spatial complexity of DV, there is a need to more adequately understand enactment of DV legislation as a workplace health and safety issue where the home is the workplace.

Finally, the Act itself needs to be updated. The Act excludes those in casual, seasonal or other forms of precarious employment. Given that victims of DV are often precluded from accessing secure work (Jury et al., 2017) and women are concentrated in precarious employment (NZCTU, 2013), this oversight has a disproportionate impact on victims. The right of employers to ask for proof of violence is problematic and may prevent victims from seeking support. This should be amended. The Act should also be strengthened through a positive obligation for employers to create violence-free workplaces, including in the context of working from home. New working arrangements as a result of COVID-19 make this a priority. As other jurisdictions create workplace DV policies, they are likely to look to contexts such as Aotearoa New Zealand. Accordingly, it is vital that the Act reflects best practice in supporting victims of violence.

Conclusion

As feminists dating back to Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women have emphatically argued: the domestic sphere, far from being an apolitical, safe base from which to engage in economic and political life, is, in fact, central to it. Industrial issues, as sites of political and economic struggle, must be informed by consideration of the interconnected political and economic struggles of domestic life which are, undeniably, gendered. In this article, we have followed other feminist IR scholars in calling for a holistic reimagining of industrial relations through adopting a gendered lens and elevating the importance of DV as a gendered, industrial issue. In fact, we would go so far as to suggest that the way DV has been repositioned to be a gendered social and industrial issue should inform a reimagining of all industrial issues in which the public is an aggregate of the private. As other feminist IR scholars have pointed out: without a theoretical understanding of the complex interrelations between the home, the state, the workplace and community life, industrial scholars cannot fully unpack (and unpick) the inequalities which form the fabric of the labour market. Simply recognising ‘private’ issues is not sufficient; the way that we position the home in relation to industrial issues must change.

This article has emphasised that, up to this point, the conversation around DV as an industrial relations issue has been minimal within IR scholarship due to historical ‘gender blindness’ and still developing scholarship exploring the interconnection of the public/private. We contribute to understanding workplace gender equality by establishing an imperative to conceptualise DV as enmeshed in the blurred boundaries between home, work and community and broader patterns of gender inequality. The Domestic Violence – Victims Protection Act was a landmark for codifying a role for employers in Aotearoa New Zealand in the agenda to end violence against women globally. However, our article highlights the enduring work to be done by scholars and practitioners in operationalising policy to improve gender equality outcomes. Implementation needs to occur in recognition of the public nature of DV and the blurred boundaries between the home and the workplace. Through our vignettes, we outlined the spatial and temporal complexities that delineate the gendered experience of DV which must form the theoretical basis for policy development and implementation. Our agenda outlines various research and practice pathways towards effectively implementing DV policies in regard to these complexities, and the role for employers, trade unions, the state and NGOs to ensure effective policy implementation. While the engagement of key actors offers novel industrial opportunities to redress the harms of DV, the implementation of DV policies, and other industrial policies, will only be effective if the gendered socio-political nature of domestic issues is integrated into our industrial responses.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Our gratitude to Clara Gomes, who provided invaluable research assistance, and to Associate Professor Kyoung-Hee Yu and Associate Professor Sarah Kaine for providing helpful guiding comments on early versions of this article.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Ruth Weatherall

Mihajla Gavin

Notes

Biographical notes

Ruth Weatherall is a Lecturer in Not-for-Profit and Social Enterprise Management at the University of Technology Sydney. Her research uses feminist, queer and ethical perspectives, and is concerned with how social justice, particularly related to gender inequality, is achieved in and through not-for-profit organisations. Domestic Violence has been a particular focus of her research, working closely with anti-violence activists to explore the blurred boundaries between work, home and public life for victims of violence.

Mihajla Gavin is a Lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) Business School. She completed her PhD at the University of Sydney in 2019, which examined how teacher trade unions have responded to neoliberal education reform over the last 40 years. Her current research focuses on the restructuring of teachers’ work and conditions of work in the public sector, worker voice and women and employment relations. Prior to commencing her academic career, she was a senior officer at the Fair Work Ombudsman and held various advisory, research, policy and major projects roles.

Natalie Thorburn is the Principal Research and Policy Advisor for the National Collective of Independent Women’s Refuges (NCIWR). She has wide ranging expertise in violence against women, with a particular interest in sexual violence and domestic violence. Dr Thorburn has been instrumental to developing understanding of violence against women in Aotearoa New Zealand, leading numerous projects, including research into economic abuse, intimate partner stalking, self-harm, suicide and domestic violence, and domestic sex trafficking.

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