The Social Power of Gender-Based Violence and Abuse in the Workplace

Dear Colleagues,

While the social and economic costs of the consequences of gender-based violence (GBV) attract attention (European Institute for Gender Equality, 2021) and gender-based violence is addressed as a social rather than private issue, GBV and abuse are still too often seen as issues between two or more individuals. How gender-based violence and abuse are structurally embedded in society and shaped by social power dynamics of our everyday experiences at work is often neglected.

The gendered nature of violence affects all genders; it is not limited to violence against women, yet women and non-binary people are the groups that are most-often victimised. Experiences in the workplace include but are not limited to psychological violence, physical violence, economic violence, and sexualised forms of violence and harassment, both online and offline. Worldwide, more than one out of five people have experienced GBV and harassment at work (ILO 2022). Despite this massive scale, experiences of gender-based violence and abuse at workplaces go unreported because of fear of disbelief, blame, ambiguity, and/or social or professional retaliation. The way in which employers deal with the topic often shows flaws and conflicting interests.

This Special Issue calls for contributions that challenge the individualization of the phenomenon by focussing on underlying patterns, social power dynamics and structual aspects when discussing prevailing gender norms and the moral acceptance of violence, perceptions or the prevalence of gender-based violence, including its consequences and organisational behaviour. We welcome theoretical contributions as well as empirical papers using qualitative, quantitative or mixed methods. 

References

International Labour Organization, Lloyd’s Register Foundation, & Gallup International, Inc. (2022). Experiences of violence and harassment at work: A global first survey. ILO. https://doi.org/10.54394/IOAX8567. 

European Institute for Gender Equality. 2021. The costs of gender-based violence in the European Union. Vilnius: European Institute for Gender Equality.

Dr. Vera Lomazzi
Dr. Anke Lipinsky
Guest Editors

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• gender-based violence in the workplace
• violence regimes
• prevalence
• sexual harassment
• victimization
• normalization
• gender norms