Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo, a Boston law firm, keeps information about domestic violence stocked in bathrooms. Last October, it slipped a bookmark with telephone numbers into employee paychecks. EADV members cite statistic from the Family Violence Prevention Fund that one in four American women report having been physically abused by a husband or boyfriend at some point in their lives. As with Workplace Violence, employers have discovered the financial impact of a social phenomenon when it interferes with an employee's uninterrupted attention to work and an ability to produce. In fact, employers have been the last to recognize the truth about workplace violence.
Most deaths come from customers and acquaintances who find their victims at the workplace.
So, in typical American fashion, it is only the rare variety that makes headlines in the press. Written elsewhere is our complaint that such approaches are unrealistically aimed only at non-supervisory employees. Now comes the discovery of domestic violence by employers. The good news is that they finally recognize that victims deserve protection at work from abusive spouses who know where to find their victims, essentially passive sitting ducks chained to their desks at work. We applaud the efforts of the pioneers in the domestic violence movement who have partnered with employers in their successful awareness and outrage campaign.