As mentioned earlier, getting accurate statistics regarding workplace violence is a slippery slope. Federal and local law enforcement do not have a standard definition of workplace-related violence and do not make any attempt to break it out. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) makes an attempt at providing definitions with their four types of workplace violence:

Although the OSHA model has its merits, we do not like to use it as a model for most businesses and other organizations. Specifically, we do not like to include criminal intent in our model as, in most (but not all) cases, the criminal came into the business to commit a property crime, such as a robbery or other type of theft, and violence only ensued after an employee attempted to intervene or did not cooperate with the robbery. Most companies where these types of crimes take place have preventive measures and security hardware in place to prevent the crime and policies that prohibit the employees from attempting to intervene in matters for which they are neither trained nor equipped. We certainly feel that data related to robberies, burglaries, thefts, and other business-related crime where violence might take place should be collected, analyzed, and reported, but we feel that their inclusion in workplace violence data skews the results and takes the focus away from incidents where violence was committed solely for the sake of an attack on others.

For our clients, we prefer to classify workplace violence as emanating from three source types:

Now you might very well be thinking that category 3, personal-relationship violence, could easily be included in the other two categories. If the victim’s relationship with the perpetrator was outside the organization, it would fall into the external violence category and if the relationship was with someone else in the business, it would fall into the associate violence category. This is certainly a valid point. We chose to make personal-relationship violence its own category as it is the most frequent type of risk that your organization will encounter. This might come as a surprise to some readers because it is the rampage shooters who get the media coverage while the woman who is killed by her ex-boyfriend does not get the same attention in national headlines.

Active shooting incidents gain national attention because of the number of people killed in one location at one time. For example, on June 17, 2015, Dylann Roof allegedly killed nine parishioners at the Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Even six days after the incident, the tragic shooting was still a top news story.

Although active shooters, such as the one in Charleston, are certainly worthy of the media attention they derive, the actual numbers pale in comparison to the number of relationship violence deaths that occur each year. A report by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of active shooting incidents between 2000 and 2013 shows that there were 11.4 active shootings per year with about 3 people killed per incident or 34 killed per year. [2] According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 1300 women die each year at the hands of an intimate partner. [3] Further, the CDC estimates that 1.3 million women per year are the victims of a physical assault by an intimate partner. The American Medical Association (AMA) reports that one in three women will be assaulted by a domestic partner in their lifetimes. [4] The AMA estimates that the yearly number of victims could be as high as 4 million in any given year.

Although active shooter incidents are certainly horrific in nature, it is clearly time that our nation realize that relationship violence is a huge societal problem and put the appropriate resources in victim treatment and preventive measures.

Please note that we recognize that both men and women can be the aggressors in relationship abuse. Reported cases, however, predominately show men as the aggressors and females as the victims. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 85% of domestic violence victims are women. [4] Therefore we tend to refer to the aggressors as “he” and victims as “she” in our discussion of the observable symptoms of relationship abuse.