More than one in five people in employment worldwide have experienced some form of workplace harassment or violence, a survey released on Monday by the UN showed.
“Violence and harassment at work is a widespread phenomenon around the world,” the UN International Labour Organization (ILO) said following the release of its joint study with the safety charity Lloyd’s Register Foundation and pollsters Gallup.
The survey was a first attempt to produce a global overview of the magnitude and frequency of the problem, and the barriers that prevent people from talking about it.
Photo: Bloomberg
It found that 22.8 percent — which would amount to 743 million people in employment — have experienced “at least one form of violence and harassment at work during their working life,” data collected last year showed.
Nearly one-third of victims said they had been subjected to more than one form of violence and harassment, and 6.3 percent had experienced it in all three forms — physical, psychological and sexual — during their working life.
The survey found that fewer than 55 percent of people who experienced it in the past five years had disclosed it to someone else.
There were several barriers preventing people from coming forward, with “waste of time” and “fear for their reputation” being the most common.
“Violence and harassment at work is a taboo issue,” ILO assistant director-general for governance, rights and dialogue Manuela Tomei told a news conference.
“In many instances, there are no adequate policies and preventive systems in place, and when they are in place they are distrusted,” she said.
The survey results were based on interviews with 74,364 workers across 121 countries.
It was mainly conducted by telephone and the questions were formulated so they could be understood by as many people as possible.
In China, where government permission was needed, some questions could not be asked; elsewhere authorities had asked that they be adapted.
The study found that the perception of what constitutes violence or harassment is not the same around the world: In some places, pushing someone could be seen as rude behavior and nothing more.
Psychological violence and harassment at work was found to be the most common, with 17.9 percent, or 583 million people, experiencing it in their working life.
The survey found that 8.5 percent — which would amount to 277 million people — had experienced physical violence and harassment.
While women are more likely to have suffered psychological violence, men are more often the victims of physical violence, the study found.
Violence and harassment of a sexual nature has affected 6.3 percent — approximately one person in every 15 in employment — with women “particularly exposed,” the ILO said.
Of the three forms of violence and harassment, it has the biggest gender gap: More than 8 percent of women are victims, compared with 5 percent among men.
The relatively low figures might reflect that respondents might “feel shame and guilt because they may somehow believe that their behavior or conduct may have led another person to disrespect them,” Tomei said.
The survey found that violence and harassment at work could be recurrent and persistent: more than three in five victims said it had happened to them multiple times.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
Russian hackers last year targeted a Dutch public facility in the first such an attack on the lowlands country’s infrastructure, its military intelligence services said on Monday. The Netherlands remained an “interesting target country” for Moscow due to its ongoing support for Ukraine, its Hague-based international organizations, high-tech industries and harbors such as Rotterdam, the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) said in its yearly report. Last year, the MIVD “saw a Russian hacker group carry out a cyberattack against the digital control system of a public facility in the Netherlands,” MIVD Director Vice Admiral Peter Reesink said in the 52-page
RSS