Failing to Address Sexual and Domestic Violence at Work: The Case of Migrant Farmworker Women

INTRODUCTIONThe concept of work life as family life and the blurring of the lines of the two are not new.1 Legal scholars have argued that our family and work lives are not as separate as laws lead us to believe.2 Legal regulation of the workplace does not generally acknowledge the myriad relationships that exist or develop at work.3 The failure to recognize these relationships has led to gaps in meaningful protections for women who are sexually assaulted at work.It is increasingly recognized that women experience a continuum of gender-based violence in their lives.4 Often raised in violent homes, girls and women are also the target of violence at school, at work, and in their communities.5 The violence women experience is frequently committed by an intimate partner or someone otherwise known to the victim.6 Domestic violence and sexual assault are the forms of violence most frequently experienced by women.7 The most recent national study on violence against women indicates that nearly one in five women in the United States has been raped in her lifetime.8 Seventeen percent of female victims of rape report being raped by an intimate partner, and forty-eight percent report being raped by a friend or acquaintance.9The continuum of violence that women experience is gaining attention in social science literature, but laws and policies have failed to effectively address it. To be more effective, laws intended to prevent violence against women must recognize that women are victims of sexual assault and domestic violence in all aspects of their lives, not just in their homes or personal lives. Women often experience forms of sexual assault and domestic violence in the workplace because the relationships and power structures that exist in other places, such as the home, can exist in the workplace as well.10 For example, family and family-like relationships may develop or exist between supervisors and subordinates and between coworkers. Those relationships may give rise to behaviors consistent with our legal definitions of domestic violence, such as mental and psychological abuse, threats of harm, and sexual and physical abuse.11Current employment laws fail to recognize the family-like relationships and power dynamics that exist in the workplace. The requirements that must be met by employees in order to access available employment-based legal protections create insurmountable barriers for victims and the protections themselves are inappropriate for many victims of domestic violence and sexual assault in the workplace.The identification of the home as private, and thus not to be intruded upon by the government, has been criticized for allowing violence to be perpetrated against mothers, wives, and children.12 By limiting our legal understanding of the workplace as a place where individuals work without personal relationships, we run a similar risk of permitting sexual assault and domestic violence against women to persist unfettered.13 In theory, progress has been made in addressing violence against women by recognizing that sexual assault and domestic violence are crimes.14 Nonetheless, unwillingness to recognize that these crimes occur in the workplace by people with whom the victim has family or family-like relationships and to create effective legal remedies and theories to address them has allowed violence against women in the workplace to continue.A perpetrator of sexual assault or domestic violence in the workplace may be a friend of the victim's, someone with whom she previously had a relationship, someone who is close friends with her family, or a family member. Sexual violence committed by a coworker or supervisor against a fellow employee may be domestic violence and/or sexual assault as well as sexual harassment, and thus requires different thinking when seeking meaningful remedies for the victim. This overlap of professional and familial relationships is particularly apparent in the migrant farmworker community in the United States and provides a unique opportunity to begin to consider these issues. …