At 5.30pm on 4 November 2015, Sharon Livermore left the office of the recruitment firm where she worked in rural Cambridgeshire and walked across the dark car park to her hatchback. The end of a long, hard day – in fact, several long, hard years – was in sight, and she was beginning to allow herself to feel relieved. Over her lunch break, Livermore had applied for a non-molestation order to stop her estranged husband contacting her. She had reported him to police the previous week after years of severe physical and psychological abuse; he had been arrested and bailed, and Livermore thought the order would mean she never had to see or speak to him ever again. She now views this belief as naive: the assumption of someone who, despite everything, “didn’t really know anything about domestic abuse”.
When Livermore got in her car and turned on the engine, she noticed the windows were clouded by condensation. This struck her as odd; the vehicle had been empty for hours. Briefly, she panicked that her ex was in the car, but when she looked over her shoulder, there was no one there. Livermore gave herself a shake. Exhaustion and stress must be making her paranoid. And then she smelled aftershave.
She knew that scent. It was one her ex-partner had worn regularly. As if in a trance, Livermore got out of the car, walked to its rear and flipped open the boot. There, she found the man who had terrorised her for years, curled up with knives, cable ties and tape.
“Obviously, I ran,” says Livermore. Her ex-partner sprang from the boot and chased her, knocking her to the ground. When one of Livermore’s colleagues rushed out of the office, he fled back to the car and drove off into the night. After he was arrested the next morning. It emerged that he had used an angle-grinder to break into Livermore’s home, stealing her spare car key before making his way to her workplace.
Livermore knows her story is “like a scene from a horror film”, but her ex’s decision to lie in wait outside her office was not particularly unusual: domestic abuse perpetrators often target victims at their workplace, because it’s easy to predict when they’ll be there. Livermore’s former partner was eventually convicted on charges including attempted kidnap and burglary. She believes he planned to kill her, something he has always denied. “He said he just wanted to have a conversation,” she says, wryly.
In March, Livermore launched Domestic Abuse Education, an organisation that goes into workplaces around the UK to help employers understand domestic abuse and support employees who have experienced it. It is the latest addition to a steadily growing sector: several domestic abuse charities, including Women’s Aid, have started training businesses in recent years. The charity Hestia alone has trained more than 500,000 UK workers through its Everyone’s Business programme since 2018, while the Employers’ Initiative on Domestic Abuse (EIDA, which launched in 2017 to help employers “take action effectively” on the issue) estimates more than 8 million people across the UK are now employed by its 1,200 member organisations. Six years ago, just 5% of UK organisations had a specific policy covering domestic abuse among their workforce. In a survey of HR professionals last year, almost a third said their organisation provided some kind of employee initiative around domestic abuse.
Workplace training does not ask people to swoop in and save colleagues who are enduring domestic abuse. Instead, the aim is to help staff create “an informed, ‘safe enough’ workplace culture where people feel comfortable they can disclose [abuse],” says Sue Harper, Hestia’s head of domestic abuse prevention. Some workplace policies around domestic abuse are packed with promises of costly support, including emergency accommodation and funding to help victims become financially independent. (It’s worth noting that this makes economic sense: domestic abuse is estimated to cost UK businesses at least £316m annually.) But simple, human gestures can also be invaluable. Livermore’s former employers didn’t have a domestic abuse policy in 2015, but after she was attacked in the car park they reassured her her job was safe, offered her time off and loaned her a company car. Most important is that employers signpost victims to external services such as domestic abuse charities. “We are very clear, we don’t want businesses to become experts in domestic abuse,” Harper says.
Still, education matters. Myths have always swirled around domestic abuse, and it is far from guaranteed that the average employer will understand it. (A cross-party group of MPs recently requested a meeting with business secretary Kemi Badenoch to discuss workplace support for survivors; Robert Buckland MP, the group’s Conservative co-chair, says they want to discuss the potential introduction of paid domestic abuse leave and how the government can promote “changes of culture and attitudes” in workplaces.) Alessia Bianco, programme manager at Everyone’s Business, recalls a manager who insisted on accompanying their employee home and helping her pack to leave her abusive boyfriend. The victim’s partner had secretly installed CCTV cameras in the property; he promptly came home and imprisoned the colleagues for more than eight hours. People can have “good intentions, but [respond in ways that are] not safe for them – or, ironically, the person they’re trying to support,” Bianco says.
Some charities adapt workplace training according to employee demographics: Jasbinder Kaur, training officer at Surviving Economic Abuse, notes that abuse may look different in different cultural contexts, sometimes overlapping “with so-called honour-based abuse and dowry abuse”. Neil Williams, who left his ex-wife and the mother of his children after she was arrested for assaulting him, adds that many employers need educating on the fact that abuse can have a long tail. “[People think], ‘If you leave the relationship, you’ll enter these golden uplands and everything will be wonderful.’ That’s just not the case.” Eighteen months after his ex-wife’s arrest, when Williams was still going through family court proceedings, his boss intimated that his position was at risk. “He said: ‘We’ve cut you a lot of slack, but really, we thought this would be done by now,’” Williams recalls. “It was like: well, you and me both!”
Not long ago, the idea that domestic abuse could be talked about in the workplace would have seemed incongruous, even shocking. The dividing line between people’s professional and personal lives seemed impermeable; abuse was considered private and taboo. “[People thought], even if you see something, is it your business what happens in a marital home?” says Livermore. She thinks some of her former co-workers may have suspected her marriage was unhealthy: certainly, eyebrows were raised when her ex-husband appeared uninvited at her networking events, where he’d stare stonily at men who talked to her. But nobody said anything. “It wasn’t because they didn’t care,” Livermore says. “They just didn’t know how to start the conversation.”
Susan Bright, EIDA’s CEO, says several factors have coalesced in recent years to make domestic abuse a more acceptable topic of conversation in UK workplaces. The pandemic helped collapse the boundary between work and home, while media coverage of high domestic abuse rates during lockdowns prompted a “growing awareness” of the problem more generally. In 2021, the Domestic Abuse Act instructed employers to consider domestic abuse as part of their legal duty of care towards employees. There is also the increasingly widespread expectation that employers should prioritise staff wellbeing: Bright compares domestic abuse to mental health and the menopause, two previously unmentionable subjects now more up for discussion in British workplaces. “The connection between them is that as an employer you do have a responsibility for your employees, and you do want them to thrive,” she says.
Also shifting is an increasing focus on perpetrators. Ellen Booth is a former police officer whose ex-husband was physically and psychologically abusive towards her while they worked at the same station. Recent scandals have shone a spotlight on police-perpetrated domestic abuse, but Booth believes all employers must be alert to perpetrators in their workforce, including those who are victimising co-workers: “If you’ve got 1,500 employees … you’re going to have [colleagues] in relationships, and you’re going to have perpetrators and survivors.” Most workplace training involves some discussion on responding to perpetrators; after receiving an increasing number of calls from employers seeking advice, the charity Respect hopes to develop a project to guide organisations in this area. “It’s important that we remember that for every survivor being harmed, there will be a perpetrator causing that harm,” says Rebecca Vagi, national lead at Respect. “By not engaging with perpetrators, we’re colluding with keeping them invisible in our society.”
For years, domestic abuse campaigners have argued that everyone can help prevent violence and coercive control, even if they are not experts or part of the criminal justice system. Meanwhile, a significant drop in the number of cases reaching court – let alone resulting in a conviction – makes it hard to argue that the police and courts are responding effectively. Workplace education will be significant “whatever is happening in our criminal justice system,” says Professor Nicole Westmarland, director of the Durham Centre for Research into Violence and Abuse, because our professional relationships can be rich sources of support. And if someone learns how to recognise and respond safely to domestic abuse at work, that may be a “useful conduit” for change elsewhere: within their friendships, their families, their neighbourhoods.
Ultimately, says Livermore, workplace training around domestic abuse matters because “work is often the only safe space”. She decided to leave her ex-husband after he tried to stop her attending a professional dinner organised in her honour: “It dawned on me: ‘Wow, he’s trying to control my work.’ That was the only thing I felt I had left.” While her then-employers were “fabulous” after that night in November 2015, she wondered in the months and years that followed what might have happened if they had been trained about domestic abuse, rather than being forced to wing it. They would have had a clear policy on how to respond to survivors in the workforce; domestic abuse would have been discussed among colleagues. She may have felt safe enough to tell someone her marriage was dangerous. She could have been put in touch with police or her local Women’s Aid. Almost certainly, she wouldn’t have had to use annual leave to testify at her perpetrator’s trial in 2016. “I wasn’t having a cocktail on a beach,” she says. “I was reliving a nightmare.”
Today, Livermore’s goal is for all UK workplaces to have an active, informed domestic abuse policy. A policy is just the start of creating a workplace culture in which domestic abuse survivors feel safe and understood, but “it’s not rocket science”, Livermore says; her basic training sessions are just 90 minutes long. Employers no longer “have an excuse to go ‘domestic abuse isn’t my business’,” she continues. “It really is.”
Some names have been changed. In the UK, call the national domestic abuse helpline on 0808 2000 247, or visit Women’s Aid, or for men, call the ManKind Initiative on 01823 334 244. In Australia, the national family violence counselling service is on 1800 737 732. In the US, the domestic violence hotline is 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). Other international helplines may be found via www.befrienders.org
