In a small West Virginia county a few years ago, Wanda (pseudonym) asked her employer for some time off to deal with a situation at home. Her employer turned her down.
Not long after, Wanda’s situation at home, the abusive partner she’d been trying to escape from, showed up at her workplace and threatened her at gunpoint. Police had to be called, and Wanda’s office shut down for the rest of the day.
Samuel “Raymie” White, Wanda’s lawyer and the Legal Services Director for the West Virginia Coalition Against Domestic Violence, told Fast Company this story to illustrate a point: Offering workplace protections to survivors of intimate partner violence isn’t only crucial for the safety of those survivors, but it’s also critical to keeping other employees out of harm’s way—and to keep businesses running smoothly.
Situations like his clients’ “end up disrupting business for hours,” White says. “[Employers] have to call the police, the police have to show up, they have to deal with this threat…It’s really to [employers’] advantage to work with victims.”
In other words, while domestic violence might not seem like a workplace issue, it absolutely can be, and almost always is for working survivors.
The problem is, most survivors, and many employers, don’t know what rights survivors of domestic violence have in the workplace, creating more risk for everyone—survivors and their coworkers.
According to a 2025 survey by social justice nonprofit Futures Without Violence, 53% of domestic violence survivors did not disclose their abuse to their employers for “fear of discrimination, job loss, or retaliation.” This was partially because 71% reported that they didn’t know if their city, county, state or territory had employment laws “that protect employees facing domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault and/or stalking.”
These protections could mean the difference between life and death for intimate partner violence survivors, says Ana Van Balen, Vice President for Workplace and Economic Opportunity at the nonprofit. A while back, she began asking survivors in states that have had relevant workplace protections in place for years whether they’ve ever accessed them. “People would say, We don’t know what you’re talking about,” Van Balen says.
Van Balen and other experts spoke with Fast Company about why so many survivors don’t know about their rights in the first place and the best methods for increasing awareness.
Domestic abuse doesn’t stop at home
Intimate partner violence is almost never confined to the home—it regularly creeps into survivors’ social lives and workplaces, as abusers ensure that nowhere is safe for their victims. Survivors like Wanda can end up walking into harm’s way by going to work as usual, since abusers tend to know about workplace locations and other logistical details, like who else may or may not be present at certain hours.
“I’ve worked with a lot of survivors where one of the most unsafe places can be work,” says Noelle Clark, the Chief Justice Officer at the organization Community Action Stops Abuse in Florida. “That space goes from somewhere that might feel safe as a retreat from the home to, once [the survivor] has left the relationship…an additional spot for danger.”
Abusive actors can also affect survivors’ ability to perform at work, disrupting them and their colleagues with incessant phone calls or engaging in cyber harassment, something Clark sees frequently. “I can’t even tell you how many sexual cyber harassment cases I have worked where the employer or boss or colleagues are some of the first to receive explicit photos,” she says. This can damage professional relationships for survivors, who never dreamed they’d need to have such intimate conversations with their bosses or colleagues.
Because of these dangers, along with potential court appearances if survivors decide to pursue legal action against their abusers, survivors may have to take time off work. “They may need a change of physical location,” White says, to protect themselves. “Sometimes, they may just need a little bit of time off to figure things out.”
Taking time off can also allow survivors the space to figure out a safe place to stay that an abuser isn’t aware of or figure out how to keep working in a way that won’t expose them to their abusers (by finding a new job or safety planning with employers).
Worst-case scenario, the harassment at work grows so dangerous or unrelenting that survivors need to quit. In those cases, “being able to access unemployment insurance…can be really critical,” Van Balen says, “because the number one reason survivors don’t leave harmful relationships is their economic security.”
What protections exist for survivors?
Workplace protections for survivors of violence vary by state.
According to Futures Without Violence, 11 states, plus Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico, have anti-discrimination employment laws specific to survivors, including New York, California, Illinois, Connecticut, and Colorado. A few more—Iowa, Indiana, Rhode Island, and Maine—prohibit employment discrimination based on employees seeking out protective orders against their abusers. Vermont alone forbids discrimination based on an employee’s status as a crime victim. Having these laws on the books matters because it gives survivors legal standing to push back if their employers try to penalize them for taking time off related to their abuse or court cases that stem from it.
For example, Florida lets survivors and their family members take time off. To qualify, workers have to have been employed for longer than three months, and as an employee, not a contractor. It’s up to the employer’s discretion, however, if that leave will be paid or not, says Clark.
Some states don’t have any protections designed specifically to protect survivors. In those cases, survivors can sometimes make use of laws related to paid time off or sick leave if they need time off.
In West Virginia, where White works, “at least specifically for being a victim of domestic violence or sexual assault, there is no law that says you get any kind of special protection,” he says. However, the state does have a law saying employers should try to accommodate victims or witnesses involved in the criminal justice process. It’s not “enforceable,” he adds, but survivors can still try to use it to their advantage by explaining their needs to their employers, and hopefully eliciting sympathy.
In cases where laws are in place to protect survivors but employers refuse to follow them, Clark suggests employees put those refusals in writing. “Keep track of everything,” Clark says, documenting the date a request was made, who was involved in the conversation, and what was said. That way, if it comes to escalate the issue (say an employer starts retaliating by taking a survivor off big projects, or denies yet another request for needed time off), the survivor has the evidence they’ll need to make their case to human resources—or, if they ultimately choose, to an outside attorney.
More states are adopting workplace protections for survivors. Pennsylvania, for example, just added unemployment insurance benefits for survivors this spring, and Virginia voted for paid leave protections. “A lot of advocacy by victim service organizations in those states [got] those protections passed,” Van Balen says.
Educating survivors about their rights
So why do so many employees not know about these protections? “People don’t know about the law unless they have to,” Clark says.
When most people start a new job, they learn about their benefits and may get some kind of sexual harassment training, but that’s usually about it. While they may gain access to a hulking employee handbook, realistically, most aren’t reading that cover to cover.
Van Balen calls it a “systemic lack of awareness.” In her investigation, she found that those responsible for enforcing state employment protection laws for survivors were unaware of them. “Therefore, employers don’t know that these laws exist, let alone the people who would benefit from them,” she says.
Solving this problem, experts say, starts with information. “The first conversation that I’m having with employers as an attorney for a survivor is educating them [about] the law,” Clark says.
Futures Without Violence has been working to provide this legal education on a large scale. The organization hosts webinars and works with anti-domestic violence service providers in every state to help them spread the information in their regions.
Once employers learn about workplace protections, they can educate their workers directly about their existence, instead of burying them in a thick employee handbook. “That would be a really great conversation for employers to have on the front end, [during] trainings for their employees,” Clark says.
For White, who works in a small county where victim advocates personally know employers (who know prosecutors, who know public defenders), sharing this knowledge often takes a less formal tone. When he’s working with a survivor who needs to take time off work to appear in court, he can reach out directly to their employer and collaborate on a way to “disrupt their business the least amount possible, but still get what we need for the court case,” he says.
In larger regions, survivors might avail themselves of Futures Without Violence’s “tool,” an area-specific packet that includes “everything from easy-to-use instructions and explanations…to an eligibility checklist,” says Clark, so survivors can quickly figure out if they’re able to use the state or county’s existing protections and what those protections offer.
Legal protections or not, says White, employers must be “willing to make accommodations” to meaningfully keep survivors and their colleagues safe at work. For instance, if an employee’s abuser keeps showing up to their workplace, the employer can put up a picture of the person so anyone working when they show up will know not to let them in, or the employer can block certain numbers from calling the office. “It’s just a diligence matter on the part of the employer,” White says. “There are things that you can do that cost nothing…that can help keep survivors safe”—not to mention their colleagues and their workplaces at large.
