Workplace IPV & Employment Law: A Legal Awareness Self-Assessment
- Rika Sawatsky
- Jan 2
- 3 min read
Updated: Jan 20
What does IPV have to do with employment law?
Intimate partner violence (IPV) is still widely understood as a private, personal issue. As something that sits outside the workplace and outside employment law.
I regularly hear some version of the same question, including from lawyers and HR professionals:“What does IPV have to do with employment law?”
The answer is: quite a lot.
When IPV intersects with work, it can engage multiple legal frameworks at once, including employment standards, health and safety, human rights, privacy, and child protection law. It can also affect how legal judgment should be exercised in real life, particularly in situations where an instinctively “hard line” response may unintentionally increase harm, risk, or legal exposure.
Why this resource exists
Many organizations care deeply about safety and fairness but haven’t been given a clear legal frame for understanding how IPV connects to their responsibilities as employers. As a result, responses may feel uncertain, overly rigid, or improvised — not because of indifference, but because the legal landscape hasn’t been made visible.
To help address this gap, I’ve created a free Legal Awareness Self-Assessment: Workplace IPV & Employment Law.
This resource is educational, not advisory. It is not a compliance checklist and it does not replace jurisdiction-specific legal advice. Instead, it is designed to support reflection and learning by helping organizations consider:
which legal duties may be engaged when IPV shows up at work, and
how discretion and judgment may need to be exercised differently in these contexts so responses are safe, credible, and defensible in real life.
The assessment focuses on legal awareness and judgment, rather than program design or operational readiness. It reflects widely recognized principles across Canada, while acknowledging that legal requirements vary by jurisdiction.
Who this is for
This self-assessment may be useful for:
HR leaders and people managers
senior leadership and executives
in-house counsel
organizations reviewing or strengthening their approach to workplace IPV
It is especially relevant for organizations that have policies in place but want to better understand how the law operates when theory meets lived reality.
How this fits with other resources
This assessment focuses on the legal lens of workplace IPV. Other dimensions of readiness matter too.
For organizational infrastructure and policy templates, excellent free resources are available through dvatwork.ca. For the equally important human and relational lens (how workplace responses are actually experienced by employees) I’ve also created a Trauma- & Violence-Informed Workplace Self-Assessment (to be released next week).
Together, these tools are intended to help organizations move from uncertainty towards clearer, more defensible decision-making, without oversimplifying complex harm or treating IPV as “someone else’s problem.”
Download the Legal Awareness Self-Assessment
(Updated January 20, 2026)
The Legal Awareness Self-Assessment: Workplace IPV & Employment Law is part of the full Workplace Domestic Violence Readiness Package, which you can download here:
You’re welcome to share this resource internally or with professional peers. Please keep it intact and credited to Clausework.
For some organizations, self-assessment and public resources are sufficient starting points. For others, particularly where risk is higher or leadership wants greater confidence, it may be appropriate to seek legal guidance tailored to your specific context.
If you have questions about how employment law intersects with IPV in your workplace, or about building approaches that are legally grounded and operationally realistic, I’d be glad to connect.
