Preventing violence against women is not only the job of support organisations.
Wherever people work together, this subject is present too — whether it happens inside the organisation or outside it. What it takes is knowing what to look for, and what can be done.
Two different problems, one setting.
Workplace harassment happens inside the organisation. Intimate partner violence happens outside it, but its effects appear here: in performance, in absences, and in colleagues’ daily lives. The employer has tools for both.
The workplace is one of the central settings of everyday life
Most adults spend a large part of their waking hours here. How an organisation responds to harassment, or to the signs of abuse, has a direct effect on how safe its people feel.
Organisations are able to change things
Leaders and HR are in a position to set clear rules, introduce procedures that work, and build a culture where it is safe to ask for help and where a report does not go unanswered.
Why us?
All three of us come from professional work on violence against women. Working on a helpline, in groups and alongside support professionals, we saw what happens to those affected — and what help they actually need.
In the course of that work we saw, again and again, that only a fraction of those affected turn to an institution. And those who do ask for help do not always get what they need.
They go to work, though, every day. Often this is the only place where someone sees them regularly — and where an organisation has a real opportunity to respond well.
That is what we prepare organisations for. The Ethical Workplace Program exists so that the right response does not come down to chance.
Three professionals, with expertise that fits together.
Legal, women’s rights and public policy expertise in one team. We have worked in victim support, run groups for abused women, and written profession-specific protocols to support people affected by intimate partner violence and by abuses of power at work and in education. We have also worked on law reform, on research, and on developing training materials and handbooks.
We deliver training courses, professional workshops and facilitated sessions on both intimate partner violence and workplace harassment. Members of the team have worked, and continue to work, with the NANE Association.
We work with a trauma-informed approach. We know the reality of those affected: what happens to them, why they stay silent, what they are afraid of, and what actually helps — as well as what causes harm even when it is well intended. Our training and our protocols are built on this.
This work takes two things at once: organisational thinking and a professional grounding in women’s rights. These are two separate fields, which is why they are rarely found in one place. It is what allows us to carry the subject all the way through — from the legal framework to the protocol and the training to the links with outside institutions — and to know where the limits of the employer’s competence lie.
What we do, and what we don’t.
Each of the items below can be commissioned on its own — you do not have to start everything at once. This work also has limits, and it is better to make them clear at the start of the collaboration than at the first difficult case.
What we do
- Training courses, professional workshops and sessions for leaders, HR and employees
- Risk assessment and organisational diagnosis
- Designing a harassment procedure and a reporting channel
- External, independent investigation and expert opinion
- Review and reassessment of the procedure once it is in place
What we don’t
- We do not take individual clients — our clients are organisations
- We do not provide legal representation, on the employer’s side or the employee’s
- We do not conduct official or court proceedings
- We do not provide crisis care
- We do not make the employment-law decision
We do not promise a calendar deadline for full implementation, because the pace of the process depends in part on the organisation. Nor do we promise that there will be no further cases once a procedure is in place. What we do promise is that the organisation will hold the knowledge of what to look for and how to respond.
“The workplace is often the first place where someone affected can receive safe support. Whether that happens depends on how prepared the organisation is.”
Let’s talk.
A short conversation will show whether you need us. If we are not the right partner, we will say so.