Executive Summary and Introduction
Domestic and family violence (DFV) does not stay outside the workplace. National research shows that around 30% of people who have experienced domestic and family violence say it has affected them at work, and that on average a woman is killed by a current or former partner in Australia roughly every eleven days. For most employees, work is one of the few places that offers safety, routine, financial independence and connection to other people. That makes every workplace, whether it intends it or not, part of how this issue is either responded to, prevented, or quietly left unaddressed.
This collection brings together three articles that examine a different piece of that responsibility. Read together, they argue that an organisation genuinely serious about this issue needs to work on all three at once, because none of the three can substitute for the other two.
Article One, Why managers freeze when DFV enters the workplace, written from the perspective of Challenge DV's Lizzy Edwards, addresses the moment a manager first suspects something is wrong. It dismantles the common fear that responding well requires expertise, and replaces it with a simple, learnable framework: recognise, respond, refer. This is tertiary-level support. It happens after harm has already occurred, and it matters enormously, because a manager who responds with confidence rather than avoidance can be the difference between an employee staying isolated and an employee finding a way through.
Article Two, Recognise, respond, refer is not enough: why organisations must also prevent, picks up directly where the first leaves off. It argues that an organisation which only ever gets better at responding to harm, without addressing why that harm occurs in the first place, has done half the job. Drawing on Our Watch's national Change the Story framework, it explains the gendered drivers that research consistently identifies as the strongest predictors of violence against women, and shows why workplaces are one of the most powerful, currently under-used, sites for addressing those drivers before they ever produce a disclosure a manager needs to respond to.
Article Three, The other half of prevention: why organisational culture has to match the work, completes the picture by turning inward. It examines what happens when an organisation's stated commitment to respect and equality is not matched by its everyday internal culture, and argues that this mismatch is what quietly undoes both response and prevention work. A workplace can have excellent policies and well-designed prevention programs, and still fail, if senior leaders are not genuinely held to the standard the organisation asks of everyone else.
How the three connect
These are not three separate initiatives competing for the same budget line. They describe three points on a single, mutually reinforcing system, and the order in which an organisation encounters them in this collection is not the order of importance.
Response work, the subject of Article One, is what protects individual employees today. It only functions well, however, in a culture where trust already exists, which is the subject of Article Three: an employee is far more likely to trust a manager's check-in, and far more likely to believe a referral pathway will be taken seriously, in an organisation whose everyday behaviour matches its stated values. Article Three explains directly why culture, not policy alone, is what makes the confident manager described in Article One believable to the person sitting across from them.
Prevention work, the subject of Article Two, is what reduces how often that response conversation is ever needed. But prevention itself depends on the same cultural foundation. The gendered drivers Article Two identifies, the condoning of disrespect, rigid gender stereotypes, and unequal control over decision-making, are precisely the everyday culture problems Article Three asks organisations to examine honestly. An organisation cannot deliver credible prevention messaging to its community while those same drivers go unchallenged inside its own walls. Article Three, in this sense, is what makes Article Two's prevention work more than a training module.
And Article One's response work feeds back into both. A manager who responds well to one disclosure builds visible proof, across a team and eventually across an organisation, that this workplace takes the issue seriously. That visible proof becomes part of the culture Article Three describes and part of the credibility that makes Article Two's prevention effort land as genuine rather than performative.
The visual map on the following page sets out this relationship. Rather than a linear sequence, from response, to prevention, to culture, the three sit in a triangle of mutual reinforcement: each one strengthens the credibility and effectiveness of the other two, and none of them functions at full strength in isolation.
Why this matters now
Beyond the human cost, national data estimates violence against women and children costs the Australian economy around 22 billion dollars a year, including close to two billion dollars in absenteeism, lost productivity and staff replacement costs directly borne by employers. Financial abuse alone is estimated to cost victims and the broader economy close to eleven billion dollars. Every one of those figures represents a cost that a workplace investing seriously in response, prevention and culture has the genuine potential to reduce.
Australian organisations now have a substantial base of free, peak-body-developed frameworks, tools and guidance to draw on for all three areas, several of which are referenced directly in these articles and gathered, along with a broader curated selection, in the accompanying resource list. No organisation needs to build this work from nothing.
How to use this collection
Leaders and managers new to this area may find it most useful to read the three articles in order, building from the immediate, practical skill of Article One toward the more structural work of Articles Two and Three. Leaders already confident in response work may prefer to start with Article Three, since culture is often the piece most likely to be assumed rather than examined. However they are read, the three are designed to be read as a set: each references the other two, and together they make the case that recognising and responding to harm, preventing it before it occurs, and building a culture that makes both credible, are not competing priorities but three parts of the same commitment.
