Ask any manager who has sat across from an employee disclosing domestic and family violence, and they will tell you the same thing: knowing how to recognise, respond and refer changed everything. It gave them a role they could actually perform, instead of a fear they could only avoid.
That confidence matters enormously. It is the difference between an employee being met with silence or being met with care.
But there is a question that sits underneath all of it, and it is one more organisations need to start asking out loud.
If we only ever get better at responding to domestic and family violence after it has already happened, what are we doing about making sure it happens less?
Two very different jobs, often confused as one
Recognising, responding and referring is what is known as a tertiary response. It happens after violence has occurred, when the impacts are already showing up in someone's attendance, their concentration, their wellbeing, or their safety. It is essential, it saves lives, and organisations should be proud of investing in it.
Prevention is a different job entirely. It is what is sometimes called primary prevention: action that stops violence before it starts, by addressing the conditions that allow it to occur in the first place, rather than responding to it once it has.
Both matter. But they are not substitutes for each other, and a workplace that has invested heavily in one while ignoring the other has only done half the job.
Why prevention gets skipped
It is easy to see why recognition, response and referral training tends to come first. It is concrete. It gives managers a script, a process, a clear sense of what to do in the moment a concern arises. Prevention, by comparison, can feel abstract, slow, and harder to measure. There is no single training session that "does" prevention the way there might be one that teaches the recognise, respond, refer framework.
But that difficulty is precisely why it cannot be left out. Waiting for the moment a manager needs to respond means waiting for harm to have already occurred. Prevention asks a harder, more uncomfortable question: what is it about our culture, our attitudes, our everyday interactions that allows disrespect, control and gendered inequality to take root in the first place, long before any of it becomes visible as a workplace issue?
What actually drives violence against women
National prevention frameworks in Australia, most notably Our Watch's Change the Story, identify a consistent set of gendered drivers that research shows are the strongest and most consistent predictors of violence against women. They are:
Condoning of violence against women, including excusing, minimising or failing to challenge disrespectful or controlling behaviour.
Men's control of decision-making and limits to women's independence in public and private life.
Rigid gender stereotyping and dominant forms of masculinity that prize control, toughness and emotional suppression.
Male peer relations and cultures of masculinity that emphasise aggression, dominance and control.
None of these drivers require a violent incident to be present in a workplace. A workplace can have every one of them quietly at work in its meeting rooms, its promotion decisions, its jokes, and its unspoken assumptions about who leads and who supports, long before anyone raises a formal concern.
This is the uncomfortable truth prevention asks organisations to sit with: violence against women does not begin with a single dramatic act. It is enabled, gradually and often invisibly, by everyday attitudes and structures that many workplaces have never examined.
Prevention is not someone else's job
There is a common assumption that primary prevention belongs to governments, schools, or specialist services, and that workplaces are simply where the downstream effects show up. That assumption is out of date.
Workplaces are one of the most powerful sites of prevention available, for a simple reason: most adults spend the majority of their waking hours at work, surrounded by colleagues, working under leaders, and absorbing the norms of an organisational culture. What a workplace tolerates, rewards, jokes about or stays silent on becomes part of how people understand what is acceptable, not only at work but in how they carry themselves everywhere else.
This means every organisation is already doing prevention work, whether it intends to or not. The only question is whether that work is pulling in the right direction.
Why this matters beyond the moral case
For leaders who need a business case as well as a values case, the numbers are stark. National research estimates the cost of violence against women and children to the Australian economy at around 22 billion dollars a year (KPMG 2016), with close to two billion dollars of that made up of lost productivity, absenteeism and the cost of replacing employees. Financial abuse alone is estimated to cost victims and the broader economy close to eleven billion dollars.
Every one of those dollars represents an organisation somewhere absorbing a cost it did not have to carry, because the conditions that allowed harm to happen were never addressed upstream.
Prevention is not a soft add-on to a compliance agenda. It is one of the few workplace investments that reduces the likelihood of ever needing the recognise, respond, refer conversation in the first place.
What prevention actually looks like in practice
Prevention is not a single program bolted onto existing policies. It shows up in the ordinary fabric of organisational life:
Leaders and managers actively modelling respectful behaviour, and naming disrespect when they see it, rather than staying quiet to avoid an awkward moment.
Recruitment, promotion and pay decisions that are genuinely free of gender bias, rather than reflecting who has traditionally held power.
Everyday language and workplace culture that does not tolerate sexist jokes, gendered put-downs, or dismissive comments about women's judgement or capability.
Flexible work and caring policies that are equally accessible to everyone, rather than quietly coded as "for mothers."
Education that goes beyond a single mandatory module, building genuine understanding of gender equality and respectful relationships over time.
Structures that give women and gender-diverse employees a genuine voice in decisions, not just a seat at the table.
None of this requires an organisation to become a specialist violence prevention service. It requires an honest look at whether its everyday culture reflects the values it says it holds.
The connection to recognise, respond, refer
Prevention and response are not competing priorities. They reinforce each other.
An organisation that has done genuine prevention work builds a culture where disrespect and control are visibly not tolerated. That same culture is exactly the environment in which employees feel safer coming forward, and in which managers feel more confident having the conversations recognise, respond and refer calls for. Trust built through prevention work is what makes response work possible.
Equally, an organisation that only ever responds, without ever addressing what it is responding to, will keep finding itself in the same position: better and better at managing harm after the fact, no better at reducing how often that harm occurs.
Where to start
Prevention does not need to begin with a large, complex program. It can begin with an honest audit: does our workplace culture, in its everyday interactions, reflect genuine respect and gender equality, or does it merely say it does? From there, most organisations already have a foundation of publicly available primary prevention frameworks, developed by peak Australian bodies, to build on rather than starting from nothing.
The organisations doing this well are not treating prevention and response as a choice between two priorities. They are treating them as two halves of the same commitment: a workplace where harm is less likely to happen, and where, if it does, people are met with genuine care.
Find out more
This article was written by Maria Delaney, Gender-Based Violence Prevention Educator, Curriculum Designer, Researcher. It is the second article in a three-part series on building safer, more capable workplaces.
The first, 'Why managers freeze when DFV enters the workplace' by Lizzy Edwards of Challenge DV, explores why the recognise, respond, refer framework gives managers a clear and confident role when domestic and family violence shows up in their team.
The third article will explore in more depth organisational culture and leadership, and why the internal values a workplace lives by, not just the policies it writes down, are what make genuine prevention possible.
