Domestic Violence: Make it Your Business

• Publication year: 2002
• Pages: 31

31 Colo.Law. 31 Colorado Lawyer 2002.

2002, April, Pg. 31. Domestic Violence: Make It Your Business

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31

Vol. 31, No. 2, Pg. 31

The Colorado Lawyer
April 2002
Vol. 31, No. 4 [Page 31]

Departments
CBA Family Violence Program
Domestic Violence: Make It Your Business
by Betty Bechtel, Melissa Trollinger, Kathleen M. Schoen

This department is published quarterly to provide information about domestic violence and CBA Family Violence Program activities

Betty Bechtel, Grand Junction, is an employment law attorney at Dufford Waldeck Milburn & Krohn LLP. Melissa Trollinger is a third-year law student at the University of Denver College of Law and Legal Intern for the CBA Family Violence Program. Kathleen Schoen, Denver, is the Director of the CBA Family Violence Program?(303) 860-1115

In December 2000, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York approved the Colorado Attorney General's Office Distribution Plan ("Plan").1 The Plan awarded $474,000 ?Colorado's portion of a nationwide anti-trust settlement against Nine West Group?to the Colorado Bar Association's Family Violence Program ("Program"). The Plan designates that the money be used to create awareness of the impact of domestic violence on the workplace through regional training seminars for employers and employees. It also states that funds should be used for a statewide messaging campaign and a website Therefore, with this money, the Program has developed a project entitled "Domestic Violence: Make It Your Business" ("Project") and created a website, www.makeityourbusiness.org, which will be launched April 15, 2002.

This article discusses the impact of domestic violence on the workplace, especially on legal practice. It also offers suggestions as to how lawyers can respond to workplace violence in their roles as lawyers and employers.

Domestic Violence in the Workplace

Often, the impact of domestic violence on the workplace is minimized or ignored. However, every year, Coloradoans are confronted with instances in which violence between intimates has moved from the home to the public arena. The victims are sometimes innocent bystanders. For example, in January 2002, a Boulder man was shot and killed while helping a colleague remove her belongings from her office. The killer was her ex-boyfriend, a fellow employee, who then shot and killed himself. In July 2001, fellow employees watched helplessly while a man kidnapped his estranged wife in the parking lot of the beauty salon where she worked. He had been placing harassing calls to the salon. The kidnapping ended in murder. In October 2001, a man killed his estranged girlfriend's employer after the employer sheltered his employee and her two children in his house to help her escape the abusive relationship.

Every year, approximately 13,000 workplace violence incidents in this country are committed against women by people with whom they are intimate.2 American businesses pay an estimated $3 to $5 billion a year in medical expenses associated with domestic violence.3 Moreover, businesses incur $100 million a year in lost wages due to sick leave, absenteeism, and non-productivity as a result of domestic violence.4 In 1993, the National Safe Workplace Institute estimated that a serious incident of workplace violence cost an employer $250,000. An incident of medium severity was estimated at $25,000, and an incident of lower severity cost an employer $10,000.5

Because the workplace is an easy place to find someone, estranged partners, mostly husbands, have stalked and killed their partners at work.6 Other Colorado workplace incidents have not resulted in death.7 The most frequent instances are not assaults and homicide,8 but harassing phone calls. Such calls frighten and distract not only the victim, but also other employees who answer the phone or who are within earshot of the conversation. Also common is absenteeism or tardiness as victims attempt to recover from abusive incidents at home.9

Domestic violence directly and indirectly impacts co-workers. Co-workers may be required to fill in for absent or non-productive victims or perpetrators and may feel resentment toward them for taking time off from work. Co-workers also may feel a need to "protect" victims from harassing phone calls and visits. Many may fear for their own safety and feel helpless because they do not know how to help a co-worker who is a victim of domestic violence.10

One of the most dangerous ways that domestic violence reaches the workplace is through stalking. Stalking behavior correlates to other types of abuse. Men who stalk are four times more likely to assault their partners than those who do not stalk.11 "Cyberstalking" (using e-mail to harass victims) is a rapidly growing form of stalking and one that can be maintained from a distance.12 To illustrate, a man who was told by a co-worker that she did not wish to date him posted a notice on an Internet site that the woman fantasized about rape, and included the victim's phone number and address. On six different occasions, men came to the victim's house in the middle of the night and offered to rape her.13

Lawyers are not immune from domestic violence spilling into their workplace. In 1986, Aurora police sergeant Gerald Utesch...