Domestic Abuse and the Workplace: What Employers Still Do Not See
- Deniz Erdem
- Feb 13
- 5 min read
When Abuse Has No Name
I disclosed to my line manager. I spoke to colleagues. Some of them were trained Mental Health First Aiders.
But no one, including me, knew what coercive and controlling behaviour was. I had not really thought about domestic abuse at all. And so what I described was treated as stress, as relationship difficulty, as something I needed to manage privately while I got on with my job.
That experience shaped the work I do now.
Because the problem was not that people did not care. It was that none of us had the language, the training or the framework to name what was actually happening. And in the absence of that framework, I kept turning up, kept functioning and assumed that because no one was naming it as abuse, it probably was not.
I was wrong. And so were they.
Domestic Abuse Does Not Always Look Like Crisis
Domestic abuse does not always look the way workplaces expect it to. It is not always visible bruising or tearful breakdowns at a desk. Often, it is someone functioning under conditions of coercive control: performing well enough to stay employed, disclosing just enough to explain the strain, but never using the word abuse because they do not recognise it themselves yet.
1 in 4 women and 1 in 6 or 7 men will experience domestic abuse in their lifetime. The statistical likelihood that someone in your organisation is living under coercive control right now is high.
And most employers, most managers and most trained Mental Health First Aiders are not equipped to recognise it.
Here is what the data shows:
The majority of UK workplaces do not have a standalone domestic abuse policy (TUC Equality Audit, 2024).
Most line managers have never been trained to recognise the signs or to hold a supportive conversation.
Most HR teams treat unexplained lateness, frequent short absences, or declining performance as capability issues, because they have not been taught to see the pattern underneath.
And 66% of employees affected by domestic abuse do not tell their employer. Not because the abuse is not serious. Because they do not trust the response they will get.
Duty of Care Is Not Optional
The workplace has a legal duty of care.
Under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, employers are required to ensure the health, safety, and welfare of their employees. The Domestic Abuse Act 2021 statutory guidance makes explicit that this includes domestic abuse. The Employment Relations (Flexible Working) Act 2023 gives employees the right to request flexible working from day one.
And soon, if the Domestic Abuse (Safe Leave) Bill passes, employees will have a statutory right to 10 days of paid safe leave. Northern Ireland already provides this. England, Wales, and Scotland are following.
The law is moving. The question is whether employers will wait to be compelled, or whether they will act now because it is the right thing to do.
The Business Cost of Looking Away
But this is not only about legal compliance. It is about cost.
Domestic abuse costs UK businesses an estimated £14 billion a year through lost productivity, absenteeism, staff turnover and the cost of recruiting and retraining when someone leaves because their workplace did not hold them.
£7,245 per affected employee, on average.
9 out of 10 workers experiencing domestic abuse say it affects their performance. 54% of employers report it impacts the quality of work. 56% report it leads to absenteeism.
And over 40% of people experiencing abuse say it affects their ability to get to work at all, because their abuser has hidden car keys, damaged their vehicle, withdrawn childcare at short notice, or caused injury before an important meeting.
Economic abuse is designed to destroy independence. Employment is independence. If an employer responds to the symptoms without understanding the cause, they risk becoming complicit in that destruction.
What Meaningful Workplace Support Actually Looks Like
So what does a good workplace response actually look like?
A standalone domestic abuse policy that names the issue clearly, identifies who is responsible and sets out what support is available.
Training for line managers and HR teams that teaches people how to recognise the signs, how to hold a trauma-informed conversation and how to respond without making the situation more dangerous.
A toolkit of practical support embedded into employee benefits: access to specialist legal advice, financial wellbeing resources for people dealing with coerced debt, counselling, safe leave provisions, flexible working arrangements that work for people in crisis and clear signposting to specialist organisations.
An internal domestic abuse champion, a named senior member of staff who serves as a point of contact for both employees seeking support and managers who need guidance.
Security protocols that account for the fact that an abuser may show up at a workplace, may call reception asking for an employee's location, or may use work as a site of continued harassment.
And a framework for addressing perpetrators as well as victims. Because if you employ someone who is perpetrating abuse, you have a duty of care to everyone else in that workplace.
Domestic Abuse Is Not a Private Issue
None of this is complex. None of it is prohibitively expensive.
But it does require organisations to stop treating domestic abuse as a private issue that sits outside the remit of work.
It is not private when someone cannot get to work because their partner has sabotaged their ability to travel. It is not private when someone is managing court proceedings, housing crises and financial devastation while trying to meet deadlines.
It is not private when 1 in 4 women in your workforce will experience this at some point in their lives.
It is a workplace issue. And it is time employers treated it as one.
Building Workplaces That Recognise and Respond
I work with organisations to build these frameworks through Safe Haven Education. I have developed ready-to-use policy documents, training programmes for managers and HR teams and a toolkit of practical support that can be embedded into existing employee benefits structures.
This work is informed by research, by regulation and by lived understanding of what it means to need your workplace to see you and to have no idea whether they will.
If this resonates and you would like to discuss what a genuine workplace response looks like for your organisation, I would be glad to talk.
You can reach me here on LinkedIn, or directly through Safe Haven Education.
The people in your organisation who are living this right now deserve a workplace that sees them.
A Question for HR Leaders, Managers and Wellbeing Professionals
A question for HR leaders, managers and those working in employee wellbeing: has your organisation implemented a standalone domestic abuse policy yet? And if so, what was the biggest challenge you faced in getting it across the line? I would genuinely value hearing about your experiences in the comments.
Comments