Workplace Training on Gender-Based Violence Needs to Change: What a New BC Study Tells Employers

A new BC study confirms what many of us working in this space have been saying for years: workplace training on gender-based violence needs to change if we're ever going to stamp it out at work.

The Community Legal Assistance Society's report, Gender-Based Violence in the Workplace and the (Mis)Use of Non-Disclosure Agreements, is a comprehensive province-wide study. It gathered input from workers, advocates, unions, employers, and legal professionals across British Columbia, and it deserves attention well beyond that province.

The NDA problem, briefly

The report's headline focus is non-disclosure agreements, and the findings there deserve their own attention. NDAs are something we lawyers tend to include as a standard term by default in settlement agreements without much additional thought. The report documents how that default practice can silence survivors, protect repeat perpetrators, and deprive workplaces of the information they need to address patterns of harm. If you draft or sign off on these agreements, the report is worth reading for that discussion alone, and it lands amid a broader Canadian conversation about restricting NDA use in harassment and discrimination cases: legislation has already passed in Prince Edward Island, with active debate elsewhere.

But the study is also worth a read for what it captures before NDAs even enter the picture. The survey dug into the surrounding infrastructure: policies, procedures, investigations, communications, and management response. And that's where the findings speak most directly to every employer, in every province.

Decades of training, without the results

Here's the issue I keep coming back to in my practice: how many decades have employers been paying for tick-the-box, don't-do-this-don't-do-that policies and training without a corresponding drop in sexual harassment or other gender-based violence at work?

That's not a rhetorical jab. It's a pattern the research has documented repeatedly: compliance-oriented training that lists forbidden behaviours tends not to reduce harassment, and in some studies makes attitudes worse. Employees learn to avoid the obvious script. The subtler, more common conduct, like gendered exclusion, "jokes," and IPV that follows a survivor to work, continues untouched because nobody was trained to see it.

The CLAS report adds the voices of workers and advocates to that evidence base. What respondents said would actually help falls into three themes.

1. Training over policies

Respondents emphasized training over policies.

Policies are important. They're also, in many workplaces, legally required. But a policy doesn't help anyone if it sits on a shelf, or if nobody knows how to respond when someone actually acts on it. I see this constantly with workplace intimate partner violence: an employer has a domestic violence provision in its workplace violence policy, an employee finally discloses, and the manager receiving the disclosure freezes because the policy told everyone what the organization values, but no one was ever trained on what to do.

In some sense, a policy is like a promise. And training provides the ability to follow through on that promise. Without training, disclosure can become a trap. An employee might take great risk to disclose the harm they're experiencing, only to have that disclosure and aftermath fumbled by the employer. That often results in a breakdown of trust and missed opportunities for early intervention.

2. Trauma-informed practice, in the real sense of the term

Respondents also called for genuinely trauma-informed practice. And I'm mindful that the phrase is thrown around a lot in marketing that it risks becoming meaningless.

Real trauma- and violence-informed practice involves more than I can cover in one post (but you can find more in an earlier post of mine). But one essential pillar is understanding gender-based violence deeply enough to spot it and respond safely, including the structural violence that shapes how survivors with intersecting identities experience harm and react to it. A racialized worker, a worker on a precarious visa, a worker in a small community where the person causing harm is well-connected: each faces different risks in disclosing, and a response that ignores those differences can make things worse.

One detail from the report stood out to me: respondents flagged the need to recognize coercive control, even though the survey didn't expressly ask about intimate partner violence. I couldn't agree more. Coercive control, the pattern of domination, surveillance, isolation, and financial control that defines so much intimate partner violence, rarely announces itself at work. It looks like an employee who can't stay late, whose phone buzzes constantly, who declines the work trip, whose performance dips without explanation. An uninformed observer misses it entirely. And that means workplaces routinely fail to recognize even potentially lethal domestic violence when it walks through the door.

The timing of this finding is notable. Canada has just criminalized coercive control through Bill C-16, we have a new tort of intimate partner violence, and pending human rights cases are testing how intimate partner violence engages workplace discrimination protections. The law is moving. Workplace training, for the most part, has not.

3. From complaint-driven process to culture change

The third theme: a shift from reactive, complaint-driven processes toward changing the culture that produces the harm in the first place.

Forbidden-behaviour training only treats symptoms. Real change requires the slower, and admittedly sometimes frustrating, work of shifting norms. In practice, that means a few things happening together: supporting workers with safe intervention skills so bystanders know how to act in the moment without escalating; condemning the problematic behaviour clearly and consistently without villifying the workers; reinforcing and riding the positive norms that already exist in the workplace; and leaning on leaders, especially those with less social capital at stake, to model respect as the norm.

None of that is a one-and-done training day. It's a program. But it's also the only approach with a credible claim to durability, because it changes what the workplace treats as normal rather than just what it declares forbidden.

The Australian comparison: a positive duty to prevent

For employers wondering what a more ambitious legal framework looks like, Australia is worth watching. Under its Sex Discrimination Act, Australian employers now carry a positive duty (a proactive legal obligation) to take reasonable and proportionate measures to eliminate workplace sexual harassment, sex discrimination, and related conduct, rather than merely responding after the fact. The Australian Human Rights Commission has published practical guidance materials to support exactly the kind of norm-shifting work described above, from comprehensive guidelines to a small business resource.

Canada has no equivalent positive duty yet. But the direction of travel here and abroad is unmistakably toward prevention as a legal expectation, not just a best practice. Employers who build that capacity now will be ahead of the curve rather than scrambling behind it.

Where to start

If you're ready to move beyond tick-the-box training, I'm always happy to talk with anyone interested in a deeper approach to tackling gender-based violence at work. That means training built around power, norms, and the harm people don't recognize as harm. That work is the core of my practice. Get in touch.

And if your concern is specifically workplace domestic violence, my free Workplace DV Readiness Package (a self-assessment toolkit covering trauma- and violence-informed practice and the legal duties that apply) is a practical place to begin.

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