Section 10 Three Categories of Assault

• Library: Employer-Employee Law 2008

In applying the elements of compensability discussed in §§24.6–24.9 above to assaults on employees, Missouri courts have divided assaults into three categories:

1. Assaults invited by the dangerous nature of the duties or the dangerous work environment or growing from frictions generated by the work itself, but that in either event are the result of some risk directly attributable to the employment

2. Assaults resulting from “private quarrels that are purely personal to the participants”

3. Irrational, unexplained, or accidental assaults of neutral origin that occur in the course of the victim’s employment but “cannot be attributed to it on any more rational basis than that the employment afforded a convenient occasion for the attack to take place”

Person v. Scullin Steel Co., 523 S.W.2d 801...