Domestic Violence & the Holiday Season - key messages for your employees

The end of year Christmas holidays are often a particularly difficult and dangerous time for adults and children who experience domestic violence. While the stresses of the holiday season and Christmas do not cause violence, they can lead to more serious violence and more extreme coercive control as family members often spend more time together and there are less support services available.

People who use family violence may use force or intimidation to solve disagreements over where and with whom they will spend their holiday, including children, when someone has separated from an abusive partner. Alcohol can be a trigger for more serious and unpredictable violence, and economic abuse can impact a parent’s ability to provide an enjoyable holiday for their children.

So what can you do for your employees who may be experiencing family violence in the lead up to the holiday break?

Firstly, remind your staff about support available:

• This could start with support available within your workplace from people trained to support affected employees with workplace support, e.g. your First Responders and/or managers or others.
• Also let them know what kinds of specific supports they can access and how, including family violence paid leave, flexible working arrangements, and workplace safety and wellbeing planning (for a checklist of ideas of supports employers should consider providing, look at pp.18-20 of the DVFREE Guidelines - Shine available for free download on the Shine website). Make sure your comms about this goes to all staff, so if an employee’s abusive partner is monitoring their email, it won’t look like they are being singled out and raise alarms. You may want to combine information about family violence help with other wellbeing help available as well.
• Make sure you include information about what support is available in the community over the holiday period. This could mean availability of your local community family violence services and/or national helplines. The following family violence helplines are all free to call, 24/7 and operate continuously over the holidays:

o   Shine

  0508 744 633

  webchat www.2shine.org.nz

o   Women’s Refuge  

  0800 REFUGE or 0800 733 843

  www.womensrefuge.org.nz

o   Family Violence InfoLine (AreYouOK?)

  0800 456 450    

  www.areyouok.org.nz

Generally, it also could mean just being sensitive to the fact in pre-holiday communications with staff that not everyone will be having a wonderful happy holiday. It could mean reminding your managers to reach out to their team members who look down or seem withdrawn from holiday festivities, to find out if they need support. Sometimes, small acts of compassion and understanding go a long way to making someone feel they are not alone.