Violence in the Workplace

Violence in the Workplace

Introduction

Workplace violence has always existed in the United States—indeed, during some periods of our history, fear, intimidation, and physical violence were commonplace in work settings. Contemporary expectations in industrialized democracies, however, are that all workers are entitled to a workplace free from recognized hazards. Until approximately the last 15 years, however, those hazards were defined almost exclusively as developing from exposure to chemical, thermal, or mechanical energy. Although some occupational groups recognized the risk of violence during the course of doing their jobs (law enforcement, corrections, and to a limited extent, health care— particularly psychiatric care), it has only been in recent decades that violence directed toward persons while at work or on duty has been recognized as an important occupational safety and health issue across all industrial sectors. The growing field of workplace violence has focused on both understanding the risk factors for victims and developing recommendations to reduce the incidence and severity of events in the future (Jenkins, 1996, 225).

Definitions

The term workplace violence encompasses a variety of events along a continuum of severity from words or actions that disrupt the workplace by making workers uncomfortable or fearful to physical assaults and homicides. In addition to variation by severity, it is clear that the term workplace violence means different things to different people. This is not a single issue, but it encompasses incidents across a range of circumstances and relationships between victims and offenders. For example, it is recognized that the violence that may occur during the course of a robbery of a taxicab driver or a convenience store is distinctly different from that which might occur when a distraught patient lashes out at a health care provider or when a co-worker or a boyfriend assaults someone in a workplace. In an effort to facilitate improved discussion of research and prevention needs and strategies, a typology of workplace violence has been developed that classifies the range of workplace violence incidents into four categories that are useful in thinking about research as well as potential prevention strategies.

Discussion and Analysis

Although the earliest apparent discussion of workplace violence appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association in an article titled “Assaults Upon Medical Men” in 1892, quantitative data on workplace homicide were first reported in studies of workplace fatalities in specific states, including a study in Maryland during 1978, Texas for the period from 1975 to 1984, and California for 1979 to 1981. Analysis of workers' compensation data for the state of Ohio for the years 1983 to 1985 generated publications focused on the incidence of sexual assault of women at work and on the incidence of nonfatal workplace assaults in that state.

In the criminology literature from the mid-1970s through the 1980s, researchers were examining criminal victimization by occupation, victim injuries during robberies in an urban area, and the relationships between job activities and victimization risk. As well, workplace violence risks were being analyzed during this period within particular occupation and industry ...