VISION workplace violence research and resources
This page sets out the research carried out within the VISION socio-economic inequalities thread, led by Professor Vanessa Gash with Dr Niels Blom. The workstream covers violence experienced at work AND violence experienced at home that follows people into work.
Summary
Many of us, at some point in our working lives, will experience difficult or harmful behaviours from others, including violence at home or at work. Some people get the support they need to recover. For many others the effects are lasting: damaged health, time out of work, job loss, and long-term financial harm. Yet although violence at work and violence at home are both common, we know very little about what they do to people’s working lives. This research programme sets out to close some of those gaps.
The challenges this research addresses
Data gaps
Very few representative datasets record employment and labour market status alongside exposure to violence, so the two are rarely studied together.
Unknown costs
The UK does not currently measure the productivity losses attributed to workplace violence and current costs of domestic violence do not examine the risks of job loss. We show that approximately 4% of victim-survivors of intimate partner violence have lost their job due to this violence, while this is almost 10% for violence by co-workers, and just over 1% of violence by service-users.
Research is siloed with uneven coverage
The vast majority of research on workplace violence is focused on one sector, mostly on health workers’ exposure to service user violence. This is important research but re-enforces sub-sectoral solutions, instead of national strategies.
We therefore examined prevalence across all industrial sectors using a nationally representative data, rather than sector specific samples, which was highlighted as key to research in the field in a recent Editorial.
Similar issues of uneven coverage were apparent in the available literature on the employment consequences of intimate partner violence. We found much of the evidence based on non-representative samples, specific to the United States. These may offer limited insights for different national and cultural contexts, including differences by ethnicity or socioeconomic class. Furthermore, we found limited data on perpetration or systematic analyses of different risks for women and men.
Measuring violence
Understandably, people often do not want to disclose their experiences of violence or abuse, which means survey questions must be designed and tested with great care. Our research showed that survey questions regarding violence exposure, including feeling unsafe, used in the Crime Survey for England and Wales compared to Understanding Society survey, led to some different risk profiles for different groups.
The impact of our research
Taken up in evidence to Government and Parliament
Findings on the employment consequences of domestic abuse were presented to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Domestic Violence and Abuse, the Work and Pensions Committee, and to Home Office Violence Against Women and Girls and domestic abuse teams. The research therefore contributed timely evidence to parliamentary forums regarding workplace support for victim-survivors and safeguarding vulnerable claimants, as well as informing the costings of domestic abuse.
Our findings on the prevalence of workplace violence, its mental health effects, and the employment consequences of intimate partner violence were submitted as part of written evidence to the House of Lords Social Mobility Policy Committee (SMP0044, 2025). The submission drew on the findings to argue that violence is a barrier to social mobility, and to call for better enforcement of existing regulation, confidential reporting channels and access to leave for recovery. This moved the evidence beyond occupational health and criminal justice, and into debates about opportunity and employment policy.
Informing national measurement beyond the UK
Our assessment of the violence measures in Understanding Society and the Crime Survey for England and Wales is cited in Measuring the Prevalence of Adult Sexual Violence in Ireland (ESRI, 2025), an evidence review commissioned by Cuan, Ireland’s statutory agency for domestic, sexual and gender-based violence, and published by the Irish government, to inform the design of Ireland’s forthcoming national prevalence surveys.
A new workplace violence module
Professor Gash is Principal Investigator on a new battery of workplace violence indicators fielded through the Understanding Society Innovation Panel; it will uniquely provide researchers with the ability to examine workplace violence within a longitudinal format on a representative national sample. A programme of working papers follows from it.
Better national measurement
The team proposed amendments to the Understanding Society mainstage adult questionnaire regarding items on harassment and violence, fielded at three-year intervals, to better capture violence at work. These will be adopted from 2028 onwards.
Guidance shaped with people with lived experience
We co-produced employer-facing guidance on workplace violence safeguarding with people who have experienced violence at work, so that what we recommend to employers reflects what victim-survivors say they need.
Fragmented Evidence
Most research on workplace violence is focused on one sector, mostly on health workers’ exposure to service user violence. This is important research but re-enforces sub-sectoral solutions, instead of national strategies. We have shown prevalence across all industrial sectors using a nationally representative data rather than sector specific samples,which was highlighted as key to systemic change (Jaspers, S., Karlsen, I. and Aust, B. (2025) ‘Workplace violence: a complex challenge demanding a systemic response’, Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment & Health, 51(5), pp. 349–354. https://doi.org/10.5271/sjweh.4249).
Policy briefs
- Gash, Vanessa; Blom, Niels (2026). Criminal Workplace Victimisation, Job Loss and Reporting in England and Wales. City St George’s, University of London. Report. https://doi.org/10.25383/city.32760954
- Blom N. & Gash, V. (2026). Examining the Impact of Intimate Partner Violence on Job Loss and Time Off Work. City St George’s, University of London. Report. https://doi.org/10.25383/city.32090710
- Gash V. & Blom N. (2024). Violence in the Workplace in the United Kingdom: Business and Individual-Level Exposure. City St George’s, University of London. Report. https://doi.org/10.25383/city.27248124
- Blom, N. and Gash, V. (2024) ‘Impact of Intimate Partner Violence on Job loss and Time Off Work in the UK’, UKPRP VISION Policy Brief no.01, Violence and Society Centre, City St George’s, University of London. Violence in the workplace in the United Kingdom – City Vision
- The link directly above is for the blog of the 2024 report which was updated in 2026 and that revision is #2.
Published academic journal articles
- Gash, V, Blom, N. ‘Workplace violence and fear of violence: an assessment of prevalence across industrial sectors and its mental health effects’. Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment & Health 2025;51(5):370-379. https://doi.org/10.5271/sjweh.4230
- Blom, N.; Gash, V. Measures of Violence within the United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Survey and the Crime Survey for England and Wales: An Empirical Assessment. Soc. Sci. 2023, 12, 649. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci12120649
Illustrations created by Geisa D’Avo
