Intimate Partner Violence Workplace Legislation: Minimizing Costs and Maximizing Benefits

Marianne DelPo Kulow [*] & Maria Granik [**] View PDF

Abstract

Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) is a public health crisis. Approximately forty-one percent of women and twenty-six percent of men in the United States report experiencing physical violence by an intimate partner in their lifetime. Over sixty-one million women and fifty-three million men experience psychological aggression by an intimate partner. Among female victims, almost three quarters first encounter IPV before the age of twenty-five. The unchecked violence follows these young adults into the workplace, costing the U.S. more than eight billion dollars each year. This paper argues that protecting victims in the workplace simultaneously reduces IPV and saves companies money. Accordingly, IPV social policy goals and business interests are much better aligned than is commonly believed. The paper begins with an overview of current laws that require employers to support their IPV victim-employees. After identifying the policy objectives of these laws, the paper examines the intersection of legislative goals and the business interest of minimizing IPV costs. The paper suggests that businesses should commit to reducing the severity and incidence of IPV, not only because it is the right thing to do, but also because it will help improve their bottom line. The conclusion provides a set of recommendations for comprehensive legal reforms that will both more effectively address IPV and create financial benefits for employers.

I. Introduction: Employer Legal Obligations to Address Intimate Partner Violence

Intimate Partner Violence (IPV)¹ affects millions of people every year. According to the United States Centers for Disease Control (CDC), it is a significant, costly, and preventable “public health issue” that “has a profound impact on lifelong health, opportunity, and well-being.”² Defined as abuse or aggression by current or former spouses or partners, IPV can include “physical violence, sexual violence, stalking, and psychological aggression.”³ The CDC reports that at least forty-one percent of women and twenty-six percent of men experience violence and/or stalking, while over sixty-one million women and fifty-three million men experience psychological aggression by an intimate partner.⁴ The cost of IPV exceeds $8.3 billion per year in the United States, and all indications are that this cost continues to grow.⁵

Policymakers and scholars have become increasingly aware that IPV is not only a private issue but also one that needs to be addressed in the workplace.⁶ Recognizing that businesses have an important role to play in dealing with IPV, Congress authorized funding in 2000 to study IPV’s workplace effects.⁷ This study led to the creation of a Resource Center in 2005 to collect and disseminate effective workplace strategies to address IPV.⁸ Current CDC recommendations for IPV prevention include a focus on the workplace. For example, the CDC encourages employers to “improve organizational polices and workplace climate” and to “strengthen household financial security.”⁹ However, despite the introduction of a number of bills over the past fifteen years, Congress has yet to pass any law that would give employers explicit federal legal responsibilities for employees who are IPV victims.¹⁰ A bill that would have provided employment leave specific to IPV victims was introduced in the House of Representatives on April 28, 2023, but it has not made it out of committee for a floor vote.¹¹ Another recent effort was a Senate bill, the Healthy Families Act, introduced on May 17, 2023. This bill “would guarantee employees the right to earn job-protected time off—in most cases paid—and use it when they or their loved ones are sick, hurt, or getting medical care, as well as for needs in connection with sexual or domestic violence.”¹² This bill also has made no progress. Indeed, none of the efforts to pass federal laws specifically regulating IPV in the workplace have succeeded so far.

State governments have embraced the idea of addressing IPV in the workplace more rapidly than the federal government.¹³ Forty-four states and the District of Columbia have enacted one or more laws that explicitly give employers increased responsibility for supporting employees experiencing IPV.¹⁴ These laws are quite varied, both in type and how broadly they have been adopted.¹⁵ They include laws that provide job-protected leaves to facilitate victims taking steps to address the violence,¹⁶ laws that prohibit employment discrimination against victims,¹⁷ laws that prevent retaliation or adverse employment actions against victims who take time off due to IPV,¹⁸ laws that require employers to provide “reasonable accommodations” to IPV victims,¹⁹ and laws that make unemployment insurance benefits available to victims who must leave jobs because of domestic violence.²⁰ There are also laws that allow employers to seek civil injunctive relief against IPV perpetrators who target their victims in the workplace with threatening emails, texts, and calls, as well as surprise visits.²¹ Some state laws include legislative or executive directives for state agencies to develop and to adopt multi-faceted IPV workplace policies, while other initiatives encourage public and private employers to develop and/or adopt model workplace policies to promote best practices in employer responses to IPV.²²

There has been minimal critical analysis from a business perspective of this expansion of IPV public policy into legal standards for businesses.²³ The business community, which is not the intended beneficiary of these laws,²⁴ has had little voice in their creation and is often caught unaware and unprepared when IPV workplace laws are passed.²⁵ For U.S. businesses to effectively participate in efforts to prevent IPV and mitigate its impact, employers must be both aware of their legal obligations and adequately motivated to honor them. Realistically, businesses are unlikely to adhere to unenforced IPV workplace laws for altruistic reasons alone, especially if they view compliance to be in conflict with their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders.²⁶

This paper addresses several questions whose answers are vital for maximizing the effectiveness of legislative workplace efforts. In contrast to criminal and family law approaches to curbing IPV, what are the specific goals of IPV workplace legislation? Are these goals antithetical or complimentary to business goals? Which, if any, of the current measures are effective? Are existing legal tools adequately tailored to either set of goals, or is there a need for reform?

Part II provides an overview of the variety of IPV workplace laws currently in place. Part III examines the goals of IPV workplace legislation. Part IV presents the business case for employer participation in efforts to curb IPV. Part V demonstrates that the legislative purposes of IPV workplace laws align closely with business incentives to combat IPV. Part VI suggests next steps for enhancing current laws in order to better achieve both the public policy and corporate objectives of addressing IPV in the workplace. Part VII concludes that the current paucity of federal laws and patchwork of state laws are underperforming but hold potential for broad impact. The paper asserts that a more promising approach is to enact a combination of federal laws and uniform state codes that encompass the most effective components of existing state laws. Such a set of complimentary provisions is likely to make significant inroads in decreasing both the overall incidence and business costs of IPV.

II. Current U.S. Intimate Partner Violence Workplace Legislation

United States IPV workplace legislation has developed rapidly in the p¬ast three decades.²⁷ Before 1994 the United States had neither federal nor state IPV workplace laws. Today there are at least four federal statutes that indirectly relate to IPV in the workplace and nearly all states have some form of IPV workplace laws.²⁸ There are two primary reasons for this rather dramatic legislative trend. The first is the growing recognition that IPV holds women back from professional development and career advancement.²⁹ The second is the re-characterization of IPV as a public health issue.³⁰

It first became apparent in the mid-1990s that as many as fifty percent of IPV victims lose their job as a result of the violence they experience.³¹ One reason for such significant loss of employment is that IPV leads to frequent work absences. Victims miss work to hide, to treat injuries, to appear in court, to meet with police, to relocate, and to cope with mental health challenges resulting from IPV.³² In addition, more and more studies have documented that IPV perpetrators interfere with victims’ ability to work in a variety of ways. Perpetrators try to prevent victims from working and harass victims while they are at work to sabotage victims’ work performance.³³ These behaviors are now considered a classic part of perpetrators’ attempt to control victims and to prevent them from gaining the economic security needed to successfully leave the relationship.³⁴

Without consistent employment, it becomes significantly more difficult to achieve career advancement and salary increases.³⁵ Since the overwhelming number of IPV victims are female, IPV garnered the attention of government officials and activists interested in promoting women’s full participation in the workforce.³⁶ One result has been a focus on protecting victims’ employment.³⁷

In 1989, the U.S. Surgeon General identified domestic violence as a “public health burden.”³⁸ In 1994, the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services described domestic violence as an “unacknowledged edpidemic.”³⁹ This growing recognition that IPV is a public health crisis provided the second mid-1990s trigger for state IPV workplace legislation.⁴⁰ This characterization transformed the experience of IPV victims into a type of medical condition and promoted the need to accommodate it in the workplace, analogous to the way we treat other serious health conditions and disabilities.⁴¹

A. Federal Laws

Against this backdrop, one might expect Congress to pass new legislation or to amend current workplace laws to protect IPV victims. Yet, many years after the recognition of IPV as a barrier to women’s professional success⁴² and the characterization of IPV as a major public health problem,⁴³ federal law still provides limited employment protections for IPV victims.

1. Statutes of General Applicability

When IPV causes a qualifying medical condition, the federal Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA)⁴⁴ and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)⁴⁵ can provide some workplace support for IPV victims. However, each law contains problematic limitations. FMLA provides only for unpaid leave. Although FMLA leaves allow victims to retain their jobs, for those who cannot afford even temporarily to lose their income, leaves are not a viable option. The FMLA thus fails to adequately advance the CDC goal of “strengthening household financial security.”⁴⁶ The ADA only supports those whose disabilities render them unqualified to do the “essential functions” of their job.⁴⁷ The ADA thus fails to protect victims who manage to keep working despite experiencing significant IPV but perform at a diminished level and fail to advance.⁴⁸

More significantly, both federal statutes only protect those with the most severe injuries. FMLA leaves are available only for “serious health conditions.”⁴⁹ The ADA covers only those workers for whom the impact of their impairment is sufficiently severe to “substantially limit[ ] one or more major life activities.”⁵⁰ Hence, neither law helps victims with less severe physical injuries and mental health conditions. Victims are left to wait until their situations become dire before availing themselves of these protections because there are no federal laws that address the effects of IPV at an earlier stage.

Finally, neither statute explicitly references IPV. Therefore, these laws only provide protection in the face of individual IPV-caused injuries but do not address the multi-symptom impact.⁵¹ This matters because often no single IPV health impact alone rises to the level of “serious” (FMLA) or “substantially limits” daily activities (ADA). Instead, victims typically experience multiple symptoms which likely meet these statutory definitions only when combined and characterized as one multi-faceted medical condition.⁵²

2. Non-Workplace IPV Statutes

The only federal statutes that explicitly address IPV are the Family Violence Prevention and Services Act (FVPSA) and the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA).⁵³ The FVPSA was first authorized in 1984 and aims to improve support for families experiencing violence and trauma. The most recent proposal to enhance the FVPSA was introduced with bipartisan support on April 13, 2023 in the U.S. House of Representatives as the Family Violence Prevention and Services Improvement Act (FVPSA Improvement). Congress has taken no further action on this bill to date.⁵⁴

VAWA is a comprehensive statute, which Congress first passed in 1994 and has reauthorized several times, most recently in 2022. The law broadly targets all forms of gender-based violence, including domestic violence, sexual assault, dating violence, and stalking. In 2005, VAWA created grants to fund the National Resource Center on Workplace Responses to help employers make their workplaces safe.⁵⁵ The 2022 reauthorization expanded funding to include grants to study barriers to survivors’ economic access and increased funds for the Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women (OVW), which administers grants for a variety of programs across the country that support victims and seek justice for survivors.⁵⁶ However, the policies outlined in VAWA are not IPV-specific, and their adoption is recommended but not required. The statute does explicitly secure substantive legal rights for IPV victims in public housing situations,⁵⁷ but neither the FVPSA nor VAWA has created any workplace rights for IPV victims. Indeed, there is no such current federal statute.⁵⁸

3. Executive Action

In 2012, then-president Obama issued an executive order requiring “federal agencies to develop workplace policies to address the effect of domestic violence and provide assistance to employees who are experiencing domestic violence.”⁵⁹ The U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) subsequently issued guidance for specific agency IPV policies.⁶⁰ While this Order created legal obligations for employers, it only applied to federal government workplaces, and it did not grant victims any particular rights.

President Biden issued a presidential memorandum in February 2023, “directing OPM to provide recommendations regarding safe leave, to support Federal employees’ access to leave for purposes related to seeking safety and recovering from domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, or stalking—including to obtain medical treatment, seek assistance from service organizations, seek relocation, and take legal action.”⁶¹ In May 2023, the Biden administration unveiled the inaugural U.S. National Plan to End Gender-Based Violence: Strategies for Action, as directed by the president’s 2021 Executive Order establishing the White House Gender Policy Council.⁶² This comprehensive plan addresses sexual violence, intimate partner violence, stalking, and other forms of gender-based violence (GBV), recognizing them as significant public safety and public health challenges across diverse communities in the U.S.⁶³ Once again, however, as acknowledged by the Plan itself, these measures create no employer requirements and are limited to federal employers: “[a]lthough the Plan is focused specifically on federal action, it is designed to be accessible and useful to public and private stakeholders across the United States for adaptation and expansion.”⁶⁴

In addition to publishing the National Plan, the Biden administration has implemented a number of recent federal initiatives to prevent GBV and address its impact on victims and the public. For example, the Office of Family Violence Prevention and Services was established in March 2023; FVPSA programs received a twenty-percent increase in funding in fiscal year 2023; the Health Resources and Human Services Act (HRSA) launched a strategic plan to increase inter-agency resources for addressing IPV; and funding for VAWA programs has been expanded.⁶⁵ As promising as these recent executive initiatives may seem, they are still only appropriating funds, not creating employer legal requirements. Equally importantly, as executive orders, they are vulnerable to revocation by a future administration.

B. State Laws

State legislatures have taken some significant steps to fill the void in federal legal workplace protections for IPV victims. Since 1996, when Maine amended its unemployment code to address IPV, states have steadily passed several types of laws that address the intersection of IPV and the workplace.⁶⁶ State IPV employment statutes take five forms. There are laws that:

1. mandate job-protected leaves;
2. prohibit discrimination and require reasonable accommodations;
3. provide unemployment benefits;
4. permit employer restraining orders; and
5. require workplace policies.

Laws in each of these categories are equally important for protecting IPV victims. Furthermore, as discussed infra, Section VI.C, the effectiveness of these laws increases when they are implemented together. Understanding how each type of law works provides a framework for evaluating whether the legislation fits with its purported goals, as well as the potential impact of the law on business goals and costs.

1. Job-Protected Leaves

While most state laws provide for job-protected leaves, eleven states still do not offer any leave benefits to those experiencing IPV.⁶⁷ The laws that offer leave protections fall into two main categories. The first type of leave law is specific to IPV victims. Twenty-four states have this type of leave law.⁶⁸ The language of many state IPV-specific leave laws bears strong resemblances to that of the FMLA, which guarantees twelve weeks of unpaid leave, as well as a return to the same position after a leave ends.⁶⁹ However, several states have added enhanced protections for IPV victims by implementing paid safe leave for a wide range of activities necessitated by IPV.⁷⁰

The second type of leave law is a general crime-victim job-protection leave law that can include IPV victims.⁷¹ Thirty-two states have these laws, which usually apply to all employers, regardless of size, and provide leaves of unspecified length.⁷² However, most of them allow leave time only for court appearances or other prosecution-related meetings.⁷³ Sixteen states have both IPV-specific leaves and general crime-victim leaves.⁷⁴

2. Discrimination and Reasonable Accommodations

Currently, seventeen states and Washington, D.C., have anti-discrimination laws specific to IPV victims.⁷⁵ Some of these laws prohibit an employer from discriminating against an employee for being a victim.⁷⁶ Others only prohibit employers from discriminating against an employee for taking sick or safe days to address IPV, or any type of leave.⁷⁷

Eight states and Washington, D.C., require that employers seek to reasonably accommodate an IPV victim-employee in a way that parallels the accommodation requirement in the federal ADA.⁷⁸ The terminology of these state anti-discrimination statutes closely tracks the ADA’s language that requires an employer to provide “reasonable accommodation” to those employees experiencing significant physical or mental impairments that impair their ability to perform a job.⁷⁹ Accommodations appropriate for IPV victims are sometimes explicitly listed in the statutes and can include a variety of safety measures, such as changing a victim’s phone number,⁸⁰ transferring the victim to a different office location,⁸¹ and allowing the employee to modify their schedule or to work flexible hours.⁸²

3. Unemployment Benefits

The usual prerequisite for receiving unemployment compensation is an employee losing their job through no fault of their own. If instead one has quit or has been terminated for “good cause” or “misconduct,” one is ineligible for unemployment benefits.⁸³ IPV victims often lose their jobs when they become unable to come to work or adequately perform their job responsibilities. They also often quit their jobs because of the violence.⁸⁴ These situations can leave IPV victims ineligible for unemployment compensation.

Since 1996, thirty-eight states and D.C. have amended their unemployment benefit laws to allow IPV victims to remain eligible for unemployment compensation when their termination is a result of IPV.⁸⁵ Several of these states provide that employees are eligible for unemployment insurance if they quit their job because they are a victim of domestic violence.⁸⁶ Other states allow employees to collect unemployment insurance if they quit their job for “good cause.”⁸⁷ Under some of these statutes, experiencing IPV qualifies as good cause for unemployment benefit eligibility.⁸⁸

Unemployment insurance laws require employers to pay into their state’s unemployment insurance fund in amounts tied to that employer’s frequency of generating ex-employees eligible to access these state funds. Thus, when IPV victim ex-employees are added to this pool, employer contributions increase proportionally. Despite this additional economic burden on businesses, laws extending unemployment benefits to IPV victims are by far the most prevalent state law initiatives.

4. Employer Restraining Orders

Employers in sixteen states may seek civil injunctive relief through an expansion of state restraining order laws.⁸⁹ Under these laws, employers, in addition to the IPV victim-employee, may obtain an order to keep a perpetrator away from the workplace.⁹⁰ The order is issued to the employer to prevent violence, harassment, or stalking of the IPV victim-employee while at work.⁹¹

The laws vary as to whether the employee victim must agree or be consulted before an employer seeks such an order.⁹² Requiring a victim’s agreement can limit an employer’s ability to obtain an order if the victim withholds their consent. Therefore, absence of this requirement increases an employer’s ability to protect the victim and other employees in the workplace, as well as to reduce IPV-caused economic losses.⁹³ However, one reason that some victims choose not to get restraining orders is because these orders can aggravate the situation by enraging the perpetrator. Angry perpetrators often become more dangerous, so the violence may increase when a perpetrator is served with such an order.⁹⁴ Thus, while employer restraining orders may provide workplace protection, they risk simultaneously increasing IPV outside of work.⁹⁵

5. Workplace Policies

Twenty-five states have adopted laws that either require or encourage workplace policies that address IPV.⁹⁶ Seventeen of these states require all state agencies to adopt such policies.⁹⁷ The remaining eight states have laws which encourage policies for all employers, including private businesses.⁹⁸ No state requires private businesses to adopt such policies. Relevant policies themselves vary from education to training requirements to safety measures and zero-tolerance termination measures. Education programs typically seek to provide a better understanding of IPV and its prevalence. Training programs commonly focus on how to recognize signs of IPV and, for security personnel, how to best respond to workplace IPV incidents. Zero-tolerance measures refer to severe employer actions, most commonly the immediate termination of a perpetrator-employee.⁹⁹

The most comprehensive workplace IPV policies focus as much on prevention, mitigation, and support as they do on developing and drilling emergency response protocols for situations where a perpetrator threatens or creates violence in the workplace. For example, policies often require education for all employees on warning signs of IPV to help avoid escalation in their relationships from an unhealthy relationship to a violent one.¹⁰⁰ Almost all model policies include manager training on how best to recognize and deal with both victims and perpetrators to help ensure a safe work environment and compliance with relevant laws.¹⁰¹ Updated model policies add proactive options such as providing a system that allows coworkers and managers to make a confidential report to the human resources department when concerned about a co-worker.¹⁰²

While no comprehensive data about the effectiveness of these policies is available yet, there is anecdotal evidence that well-designed workplace policies and trainings are beneficial. For example, one study conducted in 2020 by En avant toute(s), a Paris NGO dedicated to ending gender-based violence and to promoting equality, and Yves Saint Laurent Beauty, concluded that workplaces can have a positive impact on the lives of employees who are IPV victims.¹⁰³ Companies can contribute to these employees’ well-being by establishing clear policies and implementing educational programs.¹⁰⁴ More specifically, the authors of this study propose four ways that employers can support victims at work: (1) “[e]mpower employees to support each other–formally and informally”; (2) “[m]ake telling a manager a safe thing to do”; (3) “[w]atch for changes in your employees and check your assumptions”; and (4) “[r]ole model healthy relationships.”¹⁰⁵ Each of these strategies requires that a company adopt a policy for responding to IPV, with training for employees and managers as an essential part of such a policy.¹⁰⁶ This example illustrates some concrete ways in which requiring IPV policies can help victims when violence at home affects them at work.

III. Legislative Goals of IPV Workplace Laws

Intimate partner violence laws applicable outside the workplace provide a different set of tools than do IPV workplace laws. These include restraining orders, mandatory arrests, law enforcement training, laws requiring services for children of victims,¹⁰⁷ and laws permitting the use of Battered Spouse Syndrome as a defense in cases where a victim kills their batterer.¹⁰⁸ The goals of these older non-workplace laws may seem clearer than those of IPV workplace legislation. However, despite their varied approaches, all IPV laws—whether directed to outside or inside the workplace—share three overall goals: a) assisting victims and their children; b) reducing the incidence of IPV; and c) lowering the societal costs of IPV.

A. Assisting Victims and Their Children

The primary legislative focus of IPV workplace laws is assisting victims. The laws seek to do so by keeping IPV victims employed, safe, and supported. Indirectly, these efforts also address the other two goals of reducing the incidence and lowering the societal costs of IPV.

1. Keeping Victims Employed

The most readily apparent and immediate goal of current workplace IPV legislation is to provide direct help to IPV employee victims and their children by keeping victims employed. A victim with stable employment is more likely than an unemployed victim to leave an unsafe situation.¹⁰⁹ Sustained employment not only provides immediate financial support for victims and their children, but also allows victims to advance their careers and achieve greater financial independence. Economic independence decreases the likelihood that a victim will reunite with an abusive partner.¹¹⁰

Job-protected leaves, anti-discrimination laws, and reasonable accommodation laws directly seek to keep IPV victims employed. Leave laws allow victims to take the time they need to go to legal and medical appointments, as well as court hearings, without losing their jobs due to absenteeism. Anti-discrimination laws prevent employers from terminating a victim inappropriately or prematurely. Reasonable accommodation laws extend employment as long as possible. As a failsafe, unemployment insurance laws provide ongoing income for victims whose situations have caused unavoidable job loss, thus ensuring an uninterrupted income stream while the victim finds new employment. Bundling these four types of laws provides a complementary and multi-pronged approach, maximizing the likelihood of keeping IPV victims employed. However, only eight states have all four of these types of laws.

2. Keeping Victims Safe

Laws that work to keep IPV victims employed also keep victims safe by keeping victims away from their abusers during the workday. Business restraining order laws and workplace policy laws complement employment-preserving laws by ensuring that the workplace is indeed a safe haven.

Laws permitting employers to get workplace-specific restraining orders aimed at those who perpetrate IPV against their employees give businesses the legal ability to remove abusers from business premises. These orders also expand businesses’ rights to expel trespassers from office buildings and surrounding areas because the orders can include the immediate physical perimeter of the workplace, such as the parking lot.¹¹¹ In addition, workplace restraining orders provide the means for identifying and preventing digital stalking.¹¹²

Laws encouraging workplace IPV policies and laws providing funding for model policy development also contribute to keeping IPV victim-employees safe. Policies that include employee IPV education can lead to early detection of violent partner workplace interference, allowing for employer intervention before the violence escalates further.¹¹³ When violence comes to the workplace, an established action plan and trained workplace responders facilitate effective and expedient enforcement of restraining orders, leading to prompt and safe removal of perpetrators.¹¹⁴ Of available IPV laws, employer restraining order and workplace policy laws are in place in the fewest states.¹¹⁵

3. Providing Support

Laws that help keep IPV victims employed and safe directly provide financial and physical support. Workplace communities can also provide the support that a victim needs to take steps to end a violent relationship.¹¹⁶ Workplace policy laws that include education requirements can strengthen this community by increasing co-worker awareness and empathy. Education can also help empower victims to end their relationships by destigmatizing IPV. Changing a culture of secrecy that separates home life from work life, IPV education programs can reduce the shame that prevents many victims from seeking help by teaching people that IPV is never the victim’s fault and that IPV is widespread and knows no barriers of class, race, or age.¹¹⁷ To demonstrate and encourage action, educational sessions can also include stories of victims successfully ending violent relationships. When workplace policies require training on how to identify perpetrators, they can lead to more arrests and prosecutions, thus supporting victims who are unable to initiate criminal proceedings.¹¹⁸

B. Reducing the Incidence of IPV

When IPV victims leave abusive relationships, they become survivors. Workplace laws work together with non-workplace IPV laws to increase the rate at which the transformation from victim to survivor occurs because the sooner an IPV victim achieves economic independence, the sooner they are likely to leave their batterers and stay independent.¹¹⁹

Robust workplace IPV policies also reduce IPV incidence by contributing to IPV prevention. Furthermore, IPV training in the workplace can increase awareness of common IPV behavioral patterns so that perpetrators can be identified, terminated, charged, and prosecuted in appropriate circumstances.¹²⁰ IPV perpetrators often have multiple victims. Identifying them helps employers to address their abusive behavior, decreasing the chances that a new victim will suffer abuse in the future.

C. Lowering Societal Costs of IPV

Those who experience IPV are more likely than others to be unemployed, report lower personal income, and rely on welfare.¹²¹ IPV victims use emergency rooms, physicians, and prescription drugs significantly more than others.¹²² When victims are unemployed, taxpayers absorb these healthcare costs. IPV victims also often cost taxpayers money in welfare payments, food stamps, and other social services for the poor. When state IPV workplace laws keep victims working, they reduce the amount of Medicaid-funded medical care that IPV victims need and can remove IPV victims from dependence on welfare and other public assistance programs.

IV. Business Case for Eradicating Intimate Partner Violence

Business leaders are becoming increasingly aware of the workplace costs of IPV and have recognized both financial and ethical justifications for taking meaningful steps to prevent it.¹²³ The CDC estimated in 2022 that IPV annual costs were more than $8.3 million,¹²⁴ with consistent indications that these costs continue to rise.¹²⁵ At least three to five billion dollars’ worth of these costs fall on U.S. businesses.¹²⁶ These costs arise from a number of IPV-related workplace impacts, most notably lost productivity, health care expenses, and violence in the workplace.

A. Lost Wages and Productivity

IPV causes employee victims to lose nearly eight million paid workdays each year, which amounts to an annual lost productivity cost of about $1.8 billion.¹²⁷ These figures are likely conservative when one considers that: (1) over 81.9 million adults in the U.S. experience IPV in their lifetime;¹²⁸ (2) over eighty percent of these victims report that their abusive partners disrupt their ability to work;¹²⁹ and (3) there is strong evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic has worsened the situation.¹³⁰ Pre-COVID-19 2020 research demonstrated that workplace disruptions caused nearly fifty percent of victims to miss at least one day of work each year,¹³¹ and as many as seventy-five percent of victims reported some form of harassment from their abusers¹³² while they are at work.¹³³ Growing evidence shows that the COVID-19 pandemic made intimate partner violence more common—and often more severe.¹³⁴ In addition, the overall increase in domestic violence has created more victims who are harassed at and/or kept away from work even when employees return to in-person work.¹³⁵

IPV can also lower the productivity of the victims’ co-workers.¹³⁶ According to some studies, when IPV perpetrators harass victims at work, their actions affect multiple third parties in the workplace. For example, “[p]erpetrators of domestic violence may make frequent telephone calls to not only victims, but also to workers and supervisors.”¹³⁷ These observed “spillover effects” can also cause “rifts in teams, increase[] anxiety among those who know what is going on, and leave[] managers feeling helpless.”¹³⁸

Abusers too have lowered productivity at work, with “78 percent of offenders us[ing] workplace resources to express anger, check up on, pressure, or threaten” an IPV victim-employee.¹³⁹ In one study, as many as eighty percent of male batterers admitted that their IPV negatively affected their job performance.¹⁴⁰ Three out of four abusers surveyed had a hard time concentrating at work because of their abuse of intimate partners. Almost half of these abusers’ day was spent keeping track of their partners, and twenty-nine percent of abusers contacted their partner while at work to scare or intimidate them.¹⁴¹ The same study found that twenty percent of abusers left work or were late to work to be abusive to their partner, with thirteen percent seeking out their victim to threaten, control, or abuse them while they were on the clock.¹⁴² Similarly, in another study, forty-eight percent of male batterers reported having difficulty concentrating at work.¹⁴³ If employers can identify perpetrators to refer them to treatment or to law enforcement as appropriate, workplace productivity would increase.¹⁴⁴

B. Healthcare Costs

IPV impacts the cost of healthcare for businesses, as well as for the public.¹⁴⁵ A 2021 report estimated that the overall national annual cost of medical and mental health care services related to acute IPV was over $8 billion.¹⁴⁶ Physically abused women suffering ongoing abuse incur forty-two percent more health care costs than non-abused women.¹⁴⁷ When employers pay for medical insurance, these medical costs result in higher premiums for the employer to pay.

C. Workplace Violence

Yet another area of IPV economic impact on U.S. business is the cost of violent IPV incidents that occur in the workplace. According to a survey by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHMR), sixteen percent of organizations experienced such an IPV incident in the past five years.¹⁴⁸ Employers who fail to protect their employees from violence at work may be liable for the resulting injury or death. Employers can be found liable for failing to address threats, including both the failure to secure the workplace from known threats and for not intervening in known dangers.¹⁴⁹ They can also be held liable under torts for negligent hiring, retention, supervision, and termination should an employer fail to screen or remove dangerous employees or situations.¹⁵⁰ Including litigation costs for successful employer defenses, the cost to American businesses from all types of workplace violence has been estimated at $120 billion a year.¹⁵¹ When employers lose these lawsuits because they failed to take proactive, preventative measures, the average jury award is $1.2 million per person per incident.¹⁵²

IPV lawsuits likely represent a significant percentage of employer overall costs for workplace violence litigation. Although IPV violence is a subset of all workplace violence, women receive at least 63% of workplace assaults and intentional injuries.¹⁵³ In addition, litigation expenses correlate with the severity of injury so litigant families of murdered employees are likely to win the largest verdicts or settlements.¹⁵⁴ Consider that murder is the second highest leading cause of workplace death for women,¹⁵⁵ and that IPV perpetrators commit “43 percent of workplace homicides against women.”¹⁵⁶

V. Intersection of Legislative and Business Goals

State IPV workplace laws that keep victims employed, workplaces safe, and IPV incidence low may be desirable for both victims and society, but do they benefit or burden corporate America? Businesses’ central purpose is to generate profits. Hence, for public policy and business goals to be complementary, compliance with IPV workplace laws must be economically fruitful for U.S. businesses.¹⁵⁷

State IPV laws do create business costs. When an employer does not use an employee’s IPV victim status as a reason not to hire or terminate them, there will likely be at least short-term costs associated with their lowered productivity, absenteeism, and/or increased medical bills. Keeping the employee at work with some accommodations can also be costly,¹⁵⁸ especially when the accommodations encompass time away from work to attend to IPV-related matters.

There is also a risk that batterers will come to the workplace and cost the company money in co-worker distraction or, worse yet, violence. An employer may be able to get a restraining order against the batterer to try to keep them away from the workplace to avoid such an incident, but this process itself has costs in legal fees and lost time. An employer can try to be prepared for a violent incident and to respond effectively to one if it occurs, but this has training costs.

One cost-reducing measure might be to grant the IPV victim-employee leave to try to extricate themselves from the relationship and press charges. However, leave, even unpaid, costs money. Workers on leave require temporary job coverage. Finally, if the IPV victim-employee can no longer do their job and must leave, the extension of unemployment compensation coverage to IPV victims increases employer contributions to the fund. Employer contributions are based on the number of a company’s former employees who withdraw from the fund.¹⁵⁹

If compliance with these laws reduces net profits, the legal requirements are antithetical to businesses’ primary goal. If compliance costs do nothing to decrease preexisting employer IPV costs, they only add to an employer’s overall IPV-related costs. However, if compliance with state IPV workplace laws sufficiently reduce businesses’ current IPV costs, then employers’ net costs can decrease. Available data point towards such an offset—indeed, a dramatic one. IPV costs U.S. businesses such enormous amounts of money¹⁶⁰ that the costs of complying with state IPV workplace laws pale by comparison.¹⁶¹

A. Employment Preservation

There are significant costs associated with replacing experienced employees with new hires and funding their training.¹⁶² When these costs exceed the costs of retaining victim-employees, business compliance improves the bottom line. Leaves and reasonable accommodations, both designed to keep IPV victims employed, work to reduce or eliminate rehiring costs. This reduction in costs is likely substantial enough to outweigh the employer costs of leaves and accommodations such that legislative and business goals in this area are in fact complementary.¹⁶³ There is an urgent need for additional quantitative research to confirm this cost-benefit analysis because it would enable advocates to demonstrate to businesses that addressing IPV in the workplace will actually benefit their bottom line.¹⁶⁴

B. Workplace Safety

Workplace violence can lead to costly litigation.¹⁶⁵ Workplace policies that include effective emergency response training and concrete efforts to secure the workplace, such as keypad or swipe card entrances, can lower the likelihood of violence and provide a legal defense against a negligence claim. The costs of such training and other security measures are likely dwarfed by the cost of one losing verdict.¹⁶⁶ Again, more data is needed to support this conclusion.

Workplace safety protocols improve both actual and perceived safety. The latter can lead to improved overall employee morale and increased productivity. Decreased productivity of victims, co-workers, and perpetrators is costly.¹⁶⁷ Any measure that reduces both the victims’ and their co-workers’ anxiety and fear of a possible workplace intrusion removes this distraction, thereby improving productivity.¹⁶⁸ Employer restraining orders are inexpensive to obtain and enforce.¹⁶⁹ They have the added benefit of protecting against the costs of destruction of company property and perpetrator digital breaches.¹⁷⁰ Data quantifying productivity and safety impacts would further encourage employers to embrace IPV workplace laws.

C. Public Image

Compliance with IPV prevention policies can improve a company’s public image, especially if the company effectively broadcasts its compliance. Positioning a company as an active participant in addressing the IPV public health crisis demonstrates the organization’s commitment to its employees and the broader community. This image can generate employee pride and loyalty, thereby decreasing the costs of employee turnover. It can also potentially increase sales by improving customer loyalty.¹⁷¹ Finally, a company committed to social justice also improves its hiring prospects. Repeated studies demonstrate that young Americans choose their employers as much for values, non-monetary benefits, and supportive atmospheres, as they do for compensation or a company’s economic viability.¹⁷² According to a 2023 survey, “fifty-five percent of Americans say they would move jobs to work at an organization that makes a greater positive impact on society.”¹⁷³ Employees aged eighteen through twenty-nine value the positive social impact of their employers even more strongly, with seventy-one percent saying they would switch jobs for a company “that has a greater positive impact[,]” even if it means taking a ten percent pay cut.¹⁷⁴

Data has repeatedly shown that when companies take voluntary action to support social justice initiatives, it generates good will.¹⁷⁵ In the context of IPV workplace laws, companies in jurisdictions that do not yet have one or more of the types of IPV workplace statutes might well find it economically beneficial to voluntarily provide leaves, reasonable accommodations, and safety measures. Even companies in states that do have some or all of the current types of IPV workplace laws may benefit from moving beyond mere compliance to providing paid leaves, making use of optional employer restraining orders, and voluntarily implementing workplace policies that include not only safety measures but also support and education programs.¹⁷⁶

VI. Recommendations: Win-Win Law

Maximizing the effectiveness of IPV workplace laws will minimize their net corporate cost. To ensure optimal effectiveness, we must identify best practices, and then adjust current laws to align with them. In this iterative process, the first step should be to measure the effectiveness of current laws. While federal and state laws offer a variety of resources to address IPV, there is room for improvement, such as the creation of an entity to measure state IPV workplace law effectiveness. On the federal level, existing protective legislation must be expanded to explicitly include IPV victims. State laws, in turn, need greater uniformity and more holistic protections for victims. Finally, workplace programs that address perpetrators require more in-depth study and broader implementation.

A. Measure Effectiveness

Numerical evidence of the positive impacts of IPV workplace laws will provide a powerful tool in motivating both employer compliance and legislative action. The language of business is numbers. Quantitative data can provide an economic incentive for businesses to comply with IPV workplace laws. First, business leaders must become more aware of IPV costs. Only 55% of senior executives say IPV has a harmful effect on their company’s productivity, even though 70% saw that domestic violence negatively affected attendance and 78% of human resource professionals considered IPV a workplace issue.¹⁷⁷ According to a 2007 survey of Fortune 1500 companies, only forty-three percent of CEOs perceived that IPV had a negative impact on their companies’ bottom line.¹⁷⁸ Raising awareness of the costs of IPV among CEOs and other business leaders would likely increase interest in addressing these issues.

Second, quantifying IPV business losses will be useful in changing the perception that IPV is just a social problem, not a business one. There appears to be some progress on this. In the 2007 survey mentioned above, only thirteen percent of corporate leaders surveyed thought that corporations should play a major role in addressing IPV and instead believed that IPV prevention is the responsibility of families, social service organizations, and the police.¹⁷⁹ By contrast, in a 2012 Society for Human Resource Management survey, approximately three fourths of respondent organizations indicated that all employees should be trained on the impact of domestic violence, sexual violence, and stalking in the workplace.¹⁸⁰ Nonetheless, only 65% of U.S. companies have domestic violence policies mandating such training.¹⁸¹ Documentation of IPV business costs can be a persuasive tool in convincing corporate leadership to be proactive, rather than continuing to rely only on criminal and family laws to address IPV.

Documenting specific successes and shortcomings of current laws will also help policymakers tailor current and future laws to yield optimal results. Tools must be developed to measure effectiveness of current state IPV laws both separately and as groups. For example, do states with anti-discrimination policies have fewer unemployed victims? Is the severity of injury lower and the duration of the violent relationship shorter for employed victims? Are victims who work in states with leave policies more likely to press charges and to testify against their assailants? Do states with multiple types of IPV workplace laws fare better in any of these measurements than do states with fewer types of these laws? Finally, we need to quantify the business costs of compliance with current IPV workplace laws, as well as the corporate savings generated by these laws. State and federal governments should appropriate funds to develop and implement data measurement tools.

Once corporate America sees that the practices that IPV workplace laws require are economically beneficial, companies are more likely to comply with statutory requirements and may be encouraged to go beyond their state’s current statutes in supporting IPV victims. Indeed, such voluntary protection measures will be important while we wait for the same data to impact public opinion and, in turn, legislators.¹⁸²

Effectiveness data can be instrumental in motivating legislators who are often hesitant to embrace controversial social issues. Elected officials need proof that passing or amending laws is worth their effort and/or has sufficient support from their constituents. This data can also be useful for activist communities looking to encourage legislative action and to motivate constituents to lobby their representatives to act. Delays in passage of more comprehensive IPV workplace laws do not appear to be the result of lack of awareness of the problem among the public more broadly. Most Americans seem aware of the nation’s IPV problem—according to a 2018 study, sixty-two percent of Americans “rank domestic violence as an extremely serious problem in the United States.”¹⁸³ However, in conflict with these data, thirty-four percent of Americans believe that IPV is a taboo subject.¹⁸⁴ Concrete numerical data can demonstrate both the widespread effects of IPV on the workplace and the consequent need to discuss and address it. Communicating such data to workers, in conjunction with effectiveness data for IPV workplace laws, could lead more U.S. workers to push legislators to pass additional laws.

B. Strengthen Existing Federal Laws

The most thorough way to improve federal IPV laws would be to pass a new statute that incorporates all useful provisions of current state IPV workplace laws. However, the current political reality is that the chances of passing such a comprehensive federal law in the near future are slim. Therefore, as a first but significant step, Congress should amend the FMLA and the ADA to add specific protections for IPV victims. In addition, federal lawmakers should amend VAWA to impose the same requirements on businesses that most states already do.

The FMLA should explicitly acknowledge the cluster of IPV symptoms as a “serious medical condition.” It is not uncommon for an IPV victim to experience both mental and physical medical conditions, no single one of which might be considered “serious.” Taken together, though, the group of issues is medically recognized as “serious” and should therefore trigger a right to a leave. FMLA leaves should be paid. If paid, these leaves would mitigate the economic dependence many victims experience.¹⁸⁵

Similarly, the ADA should characterize the multi-symptom effects of IPV on victims as one aggregate “impairment.” By doing so, Congress would open the door for the EEOC to issue guidelines specific to IPV, as it does for other types of impairments.¹⁸⁶ Such guidelines could assist in determinations of whether an IPV impairment is having a “significant” impact on a victim’s daily life and their “major life activities” even though, taken alone, no single component “impairment” would rise to this level. Since such an impact is common, this small statutory change would extend ADA protection to many IPV victims. This is particularly important because all those protected by the ADA are entitled to “reasonable accommodations.”

Future VAWA reauthorizations should also incorporate workplace rights specific to IPV victims. VAWA needs teeth. While the 2022 VAWA reauthorization and the creation of the National Plan to End GBV are important steps, the Act must go further. The Act should give IPV victims substantive legal rights in the workplace parallel to the rights it currently gives victims in immigration and public housing settings.¹⁸⁷ Moreover, the VAWA should require that all federal workplaces have a workplace violence prevention policy and that these policies contain provisions specific to IPV. Such a requirement currently only exists as an Executive Order and should be made permanent by inclusion in the federal statute. The VAWA must also build on that executive order by defining a minimally compliant policy. To do so, the VAWA can incorporate by reference a model policy drafted by an appropriate federal agency or by the National Resource Center.¹⁸⁸

C. Enhance Scope of State Laws

State laws can be improved by borrowing from each other’s best practices. These can be identified through effectiveness measurement metrics, but, in the interim, there are some steps we can identify through a common-sense-based approach. For example, IPV workplace laws are designed to work in a complementary fashion. Therefore, they are each more likely to be effective if implemented in tandem. To illustrate, an unemployment insurance guarantee without an anti-discrimination law may be contradictory and more expensive for taxpayers. These laws should work together to create a balance between keeping victims employed (by utilizing anti-discrimination laws to prohibit employers from firing those who are experiencing domestic violence) and ensuring that victims who cannot continue working can maintain financial independence and rebuild their lives without returning to their abuser. Yet, twenty-four states have this statutory scheme.¹⁸⁹ Similarly, an anti-discrimination law without a leave law would be difficult to enforce since missing work would quite likely be a legitimate non-discriminatory reason to fire a victim, yet this situation exists in a number of states. Additionally, at least ten states with non-discrimination statutes do not require reasonable accommodations; without such accomodations, IPV victims may be unable to continue to produce adequate work.¹⁹⁰

To avoid these self-evident limitations, it is desirable to ensure that each state is implementing all existing effective types of current IPV laws. However, while forty-four states and D.C. have at least one IPV law, a number of states have more than one type of law, six states have no IPV laws, and only two states have the full template of current IPV workplace laws.¹⁹¹

In the absence of a comprehensive federal statute, passing each type of IPV workplace law separately in each state is daunting. One approach to addressing the patchwork of state laws would be to draft a uniform model law that encompasses all current types of IPV workplace laws. Just as states have done with the Uniform Commercial Code and other uniform and model acts, states would then merely need to pass one already-drafted statute.¹⁹²

In the interim, individual state laws can be added. To achieve one piece of this, Congress should provide economic incentives to the states to add IPV victims to their state unemployment compensation programs, as it did in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.¹⁹³ Each state should also pass statutes providing injunctive relief to employers who seek restraining orders to ensure workplace safety by keeping IPV perpetrators out of their companies and cyberspaces.

In addition, while we wait for “best practices” data, existing state laws can be strengthened based on self-evident needs. For example, job-protected leave laws should be IPV-specific. Whether separate or explicitly part of a general crime victim job-protective leave law, these leaves should be available for a wide range of activities that crime victims often need to undertake, not only for court appearances and other prosecution-related meetings. The leave requirements should apply to all public and private employers, regardless of size, and be of a specified minimum, though not a maximum, length.

Similarly, all states should adopt IPV anti-discrimination laws which include reasonable accommodation provisions. These laws should explicitly list the most common types of accommodations that IPV victims require. State agencies equivalent to the federal EEOC can provide specific guidance on the requirements that such laws should incorporate.¹⁹⁴

States should also require (not merely encourage) all employers (not merely public ones) to implement workplace IPV policies. These statutes should include both model policies and specific minimum provisions that each policy must contain. The required provisions should include educational programs,¹⁹⁵ a confidential internal reporting system,¹⁹⁶ and an emergency response action plan.

D. Develop Workplace Policies to Address Perpetrators

Very little legislation addresses workplace involvement in efforts to reduce the number of IPV perpetrators, whether through early detection or increased prosecution. Some IPV workplace laws may indirectly achieve part of this goal. For example, leaves—especially paid leaves—promote economic independence, which in turn increases the chances that the victim will leave the abusive relationship.¹⁹⁷ This independence may allow victims to press charges in order to hold perpetrators accountable. However, leaves do not lead to convictions of the leave-granting employer’s own employee perpetrators. No current IPV workplace law directly addresses the corporate costs associated with employing perpetrators. These include distraction to others, risk of violence in the workplace, potential for lawsuits for inadequate security, and perpetrators’ own reduced productivity.

It is in businesses’ best interests to avoid employing individuals who pose a danger to others or are unproductive because they are engaging in harassment and abuse. We should create a toolbox of laws that support identification of employee perpetrators and enable employers to prevent future violence by addressing their behavior. As some scholars have argued, “employer sanctions can increase batterer accountability and increase safety.”¹⁹⁸ Laws and policies addressing perpetrators may range in responses from “referrals to resources, discipline, or both.”¹⁹⁹ However, the majority of states do not yet have a framework for employers to refer perpetrators to counseling or training, or to discipline or even terminate them. In an indirect way, employers can discipline or terminate such workers for poor performance or criminal activity.²⁰⁰ However, for those perpetrators who manage to maintain their work performance and avoid arrest, employers risk a wrongful discharge lawsuit for termination or even disciplinary action. Employer hesitation to risk such actions is borne out by studies demonstrating that IPV perpetrated during worktime is widespread and largely unaddressed.²⁰¹

Laws that help to identify perpetrators must also shield employers from liability for requiring perpetrators to seek help. One study from 2019 reports that “some men convicted of IPV report that workplace supports might have been beneficial to help them address their use of violence.”²⁰² This outcome can help reduce the number of perpetrators while also saving businesses money and keeping workplaces safe. However, to encourage employers to offer this support, we must create legal safeguards to insure against employer liability, as well as the damage of false allegations to the “identified” employee.

Current model workplace policies and statutes focus predominantly on protecting and assisting victim-employees. Making the identification of perpetrators a higher priority and a less risky move would send a strong message to all managers. As a first step, even a few relevant provisions could help deter perpetrators. Companies can adopt and make it widely known that they have a “zero-tolerance” policy for perpetrators.²⁰³ Such a policy should clearly state that employee perpetrators will be subject to disciplinary action up to and including termination, even if their unlawful actions occur outside the workplace.²⁰⁴ Including this provision in an employee handbook enables employers to take action with reduced concern for wrongful termination liability.

Model IPV workplace policies should also create a confidential process for reporting IPV.²⁰⁵ Strong privacy protocols help victims and survivors who report IPV feel safe. Encouraging confidential reporting allows employees who witness violence or suspect that a co-worker is either a victim or a perpetrator to report these observations safely and with confidence that neither victim nor perpetrator will know about their report. This can be a vital information-collection device for employers, who can use the information to investigate an employee who may be a perpetrator, to document the basis for any subsequent disciplinary actions, or to take appropriate steps to protect a victim. To ensure proper handling of these reports, companies need to invest in training managers and employees on the proper ways to respond. In addition to having a process for verifying the accuracy of IPV reports, employers should know that at times a non-punitive response would potentially be most productive. The call for better identification is not necessarily a call for more punishment. Rather, it is a precondition for treatment referrals and other ways that perpetrators can receive help and potentially abstain from additional violence.²⁰⁶ Engaging a professional consultant to help managers discern appropriate responses would be a useful and legally protective step.

In cases where sanctions or termination are unavoidable, employers need to have model policies in place that include statements prohibiting the use of work resources or work time to threaten or abuse others.²⁰⁷ This would make it a violation of company policy to use company software or computer or phone resources to harass or threaten someone. Such a violation helps provide a legal “cause” for termination and would permit employers to search work e-mail and phone accounts of suspected perpetrators for evidence if they receive a credible report that an employee is engaging in IPV while at work.²⁰⁸ These measures can be powerful tools in assisting local law enforcement in identifying perpetrators and in securing their successful prosecution when criminal justice involvement is necessary to ensure safety and provide accountability. If used sparingly and responsibly, these provisions can contribute to IPV prevention efforts by increasing arrests, prosecutions, and convictions of perpetrators before they can become serial perpetrators.

VII. Conclusion: Workplace IPV Laws Benefit Employers

IPV costs U.S. businesses money when they employ victims and perpetrators. To make matters worse, preliminary data gathered about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on IPV indicate that quarantine regimes and increased work from home caused a rise in the number of IPV incidents.²⁰⁹ These developments are likely to increase employer IPV costs, both from some new victims returning to the workplace and others continuing to work remotely where they cannot be reached as effectively by the employer’s prevention and education programs. In this context, it is not surprising that most business leaders see themselves as ancillary victims of IPV, rather than socially responsible actors who need to be part of the eradication effort.²¹⁰

Using the workplace as a tool to combat IPV is potentially a very effective addition to the arsenal of laws that seek to reduce and mitigate it and would simultaneously help lower the costs of IPV on U.S. businesses. However, in order to gain widespread corporate support of these laws, quantitative evidence must be collected to demonstrate that these measures will help the employer as well as the employee. The collected data will optimize efforts both to minimize the costs of businesses’ statutory compliance and to maximize the societal and business benefits of the statutes.

Enacted strategically and implemented properly, IPV workplace laws can help victims stay safely employed, lessen the severity and shorten the duration of their violent relationships, maintain their income stream, and lower the overall incidence and public costs of IPV by encouraging prosecution of perpetrators. At the same time, these measures can work to reduce and ultimately remove the high business costs of productivity loss, increased sick time and absenteeism, increased medical expenses, and employer exposure to litigation costs for violence inflicted at the workplace. Increasing identification of IPV perpetrators can additionally decrease the overall prevalence of IPV because most perpetrators have multiple victims. For all of these reasons, it makes economic sense for companies to support employee victims and to stand behind comprehensive federal and state legislation aimed at protecting IPV victims across the United States.

[*] Gregory H. Adamian Professor of Law, Bentley University.

[**] Assistant Professor of Law, Bentley University.

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