By Marjorie Hecht

It’s surprising that human infants as young as 10 months may be able to identify social rank. Research suggests that infants learn to distinguish who around them is dominant, using relative body size as a cue.

Experiments by University of Oslo psychologist Lotte Thomsen indicate that infants may use the cue of body size to predict that a larger-sized object will prevail over a smaller-sized object in a controlled visual representation. And, a Yale University research team found that infants as young as three months seem to be able to recognize that voice pitch correlates with body size, with smaller organisms producing a higher pitch sound.

How Do We Know What Infants Think?

Researching and evaluating infant perceptions is complex. Experiments assessing infant reactions involve familiarizing them with an animated visual object, such as a colored block, and then varying its relationship with another similar block.

When the expected relationship is reversed, in what’s called a “violation of expectation,” researchers measure how long the infant gazes at the anomalous image, as compared to the length of its gaze on an expected image. The longer gaze at the unexpected image is interpreted as meaning that the infant recognizes something is not right.

For example, to assess the perception of dominance, Thomsen and an international team of researchers showed infants animations depicting a small and a large block moving toward each other, where one or the other would bow and give way to avoid a collision. In a series of experiments, they found that the infants gazed longer when the larger object yielded to the smaller one, suggesting that this was not what the infant expected.

This line of research suggests that by one year of age, infants may be able to recognize that size is related to strength and dominance, that the bigger size will prevail in a conflict situation, and that this holds for other conflict situations. These experiments conclude that knowledge of cues about perceiving social hierarchy develops very early in the human organism, and continues to develop through childhood and adolescence.

Other Species Do It Too

Studies comparing the hierarchical structure of human societies to those of other species suggest that “there may be no fundamental discontinuities between social structure in humans and animals.” Social hierarchy in animal groups is nearly ubiquitous: Non-human primates, insects, birds, and fish do it.

Social groups of non-human species form hierarchies to help protect the group from predators, reduce aggression within the group, find and allocate resources, and ensure that those at the top of the hierarchy can reproduce successfully—all of which is thought to contribute to the well-being of the group as a whole.

Social grooming is important in holding primate groups together by encouraging bonding. Studies show that primate grooming triggers the brain to release endorphins, which promote a sense of well-being and relaxation and at the same time create a sense of mutual trust. Grooming among primates can also be used as a form of conflict resolution and reconciliation. It’s suggested that the time-consuming grooming necessity limits the upper limit of primate group size to about 50.

Humans replicate the grooming effect of stimulating endorphins, Oxford University psychologist R. I. M. Dunbar suggests in a 2020 article, by creating a “form of grooming-at-a-distance,” which includes laughter, singing, dancing, storytelling, and communal eating and drinking. With humans as with primates, the endorphin-releasing practices allow the group members to know each other and predict the future behavior of group members.

Neural Connections

The neural connections to status and status perception are an ongoing area of research in both primates and humans. Temple University psychology researchers suggest that there is an “evolved origin for attaining high status and recognizing status in others” in both non-human primates and human adults.

Using MRI imaging, scientists looking at the brain areas related to the perception of social status and dominance have identified regions of the brain and neurotransmitters that are activated when humans or primates are involved in perception of dominance in a relationship. Research results vary by experimental setup, but the studies have consistently identified the same specific brain areas, including the amygdala, the hippocampus, and the prefrontal cortex, as being part of the neural network involved.

Future research, perhaps aided by improved imaging and detecting techniques, is needed to create a more precise picture of how the brains of humans and primates are involved in social status perception, the researchers conclude. What is known is that the perception of dominance is learned in human infants and continues to develop in complexity as the individual ages and gains more social experience.

Good or Bad Hierarchy?

If hierarchical organization is actually innate and even necessary for human institutions, the question is then how to make use of this reality.

Hierarchies can be characterized as benevolent or autocratic, based on whether they primarily benefit the general good, those at the bottom and middle, or the few at the top. Looking at human history, the hierarchical societies that come to mind are “bad” in the minds of most people. Think of dictators like Stalin or Hitler, or more modern ones.

But, as one research team argues, “Equality is a mirage.” To function well, a large-scale society needs a system of organization that involves hierarchies, according to political theorists at the University of Hong Kong, Wang Pei and Canadian Daniel A. Bell. They point to the failure of China’s Cultural Revolution, as an example of failed “equality.” Instead, they propose:

“The choice is not between a society with no hierarchies and one with hierarchies, but rather between a society with unjust hierarchies that perpetuate unjust power structures and one with just hierarchies that serve morally desirable purposes.”

The question becomes not a choice between equality or hierarchy, but how to shape a hierarchical society into one that promotes more equality.

The Consequences of Inequality

Equality is now a hot topic in society, whether talking about gender, religion, race, income, or education. Generally, the arc of political development is bending toward more equality, and away from traditional inequalities such as relegating women to a lower rank.

The question of equality isn’t an abstract one. Perception of lower social status has consequences for mental and physical health and well-being, as well as life expectancy, for humans and animals. As a 2019 anthropological study of rhesus macaques reports, “[S]ocial adversity gets under the skin over long time spans.” Writing in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Sciences, an international team of researchers concluded that social adversity affects the immune system in female macaques, with some variation, such as type of pathogen, length of exposure, and degree of social adversity.

Scores of studies document the adverse effects of the perception of low socioeconomic status in human beings. For example, a meta-analysis of 44 studies of teenagers 12-19, conducted by researchers at Concordia University in Montreal, found that lower self-perceptions of status correlate with worse health. Interestingly, the study suggests that objective indicators such as wealth were not as relevant to health as subjective perceptions of status.

One very specific study published in Health Psychology in 2008 looked at the objective socioeconomic status and subjective perception of status and how each was affected by the common cold virus. The researchers involved 193 healthy U.S. adults, who were first ranked objectively and subjectively on social status indicators. After six weeks, the study volunteers were screened for any cold symptoms and if they had none, they were exposed to one of two varieties of a common cold virus. Over the next few days, the volunteers were monitored for cold systems.

The surprising bottom line: Subjectively perceived lower social status correlated with greater susceptibility to catching a cold. Objective lower social status did not have this association.

Toward Better Health and Happiness

As University of Toronto psychologist Marc A. Fournier explains, “Income inequality casts a pall over the quality of societal relations, such that everyone living in a more stratified society is less likely to trust others or become involved in community life.” Further, those who subjectively rank themselves with lower social status, as many different studies show, are more likely to have lower levels of happiness.

The remedies for creating more happiness, and consequently better health, are not mysterious, just an ongoing challenge. Income redistribution is one sure measure, for example, through progressive taxation. A few studies covering several countries over a few decades have documented that this decreases income inequality and increases happiness.

Other measures also seem self-evident. Are there opportunities in society for advancing one’s status? How can public education systems foster such opportunities? How does the education system prepare young individuals to have more mastery over their lives? How do social institutions create more opportunities for positive community relationships?

Perceptions of dominance and social rank seem to begin very early in life, and later self-perceptions of lower rank, whether or not accurate, affect health and happiness. The open questions are how innate such perceptions are, and how society’s approach to equality can help change these perceptions for the better.

AUTHOR: Marjorie Hecht is a longtime magazine editor and writer with a specialty in science topics. She is a freelance writer and community activist living on Cape Cod. You can read more of Hecht’s work on the Observatory.

This article was produced by Human Bridges.

The Independent Media Institute (IMI) is a nonprofit organization that educates the public through a diverse array of independent media projects and programs. IMI works with journalists and media outlets to shine a spotlight on stories that are vital to the public interest, using multiple media formats and distribution channels.

 

AREN'T  THEY  SOME  KIND  OF  WONDERFUL?

      WE  NEED  MORE  LIKE  THESE  FABULOUS  WOMEN  ON  THE  SUPREME COURT AND EVERYWHERE  DECISIONS  OF  GOVERNANCE  TAKE  PLACE.

By Jennifer Gerson

Experts say the relationship between social media, self-comparison, body image and self-harm means that there’s no singular culprit in the youth mental health crisis. 

 In May, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a new advisory on the effects social media usage can have on teen mental health, specifically calling attention to the way it can perpetuate body dissatisfaction, disordered eating behaviors and social comparison in adolescent girls. 

Videos and pictures on image-based social media platforms can trigger intense episodes of self-comparison in adolescent and teen girls. Because of their still-developing brains, they may process this self-comparison in ways that can pose real risks to their mental health — and lives. Suicide is the second leading cause of death among those with anorexia nervosa, and suicidal behavior is more likely among those with bulimia nervosa and binge eating disorder. 

The more teenage girls are on social media and exposed to image-based social media in particular, the more likely they are to have poor body image,” said Amanda Raffoul, an instructor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and an expert on eating disorder prevention. 

Since eating disorders have among the highest mortality rates of any psychiatric illness, and they also elevate a person’s risk of dying by suicide, awareness about the connection between social media and disordered eating is an important tool for parents and those who works with young people to have. Also important, though, is not scapegoating social media for adverse mental health outcomes without a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics at play.

According to a 2022 study done by the Pew Research Center:

• 92 percent of teen girls report using YouTube.
• Another 73 percent say they use TikTok.
• 69 percent say they use Instagram.
• 64 percent say they use Snapchat.

Girls are more likely than boys to say they spend too much time on social media — 41 percent to 31 percent — and also are more likely than boys to say that it would be hard for them to give up social media, 58 percent compared to 49 percent, the survey found. 

One problem that drives the development of eating disorders and self-harming behavior, Raffoul said, is a societal acceptance of body dissatisfaction in teen girls as normal. 

Read the Full Story

This story was originally published by The 19^th. 

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So why aren’t employers complying?       

 By  Chabeli Carrazana

 

Many domestic violence survivors qualify for unemployment insurance, can take time off to go to court or can ask for workplace accommodations. But few even know those laws exist and fewer employers are following them.

The violence had escalated for years before one day in October 2020, when Virginia’s husband threatened her life in front of her two children. She fled. The three of them hid in a domestic violence shelter in New York City as a global pandemic raged. 

Virginia, whose full name is being withheld to protect her safety, wondered how she would care for her children. She was their sole caregiver, and most child care options had shuttered in the pandemic. Her shift at work as an ultrasound tech ran until 10 p.m. every weeknight, an hour past the shelter’s curfew. 

The only thing that made sense was asking for an earlier shift. The day after fleeing her husband, Virginia arrived to work at St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx, where she’d been a tech for more than six years, with her 4- and 5-year-old and a letter from the shelter explaining to the head of the radiology department that she’d need a new schedule. Under New York City law, employers are required to accommodate workplace requests from domestic violence survivors unless it would create an “undue hardship” for the business. They’re also required to engage in a discussion with the worker to try to accommodate their needs.

Instead, Virginia said she was told to take time off to handle her situation. When she returned a week later, she was told that no one in the ultrasound department had been consulted about her request, and she was asked to take two more weeks of leave because the department remained “concerned for her well-being.” They would have to be unpaid weeks, however, because she’d used all her paid time off. 

“That’s when I start realizing they are not doing anything,” Virginia told The 19th. 

Forty-one percent of all women and a quarter of men experience sexual or physical violence or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime, according to 2022 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

By the end of October, she was told the department could not accommodate her shift change or her extended leave — the one she said she’d been told to go on. And after she didn’t show up to work on her original return date because she fell ill with COVID-19, she got an email from the HR department: She had been fired for what they claimed was “job abandonment.” The termination letter made no mention of her request for accommodations three weeks earlier, or the fact that she’d communicated that she had COVID and couldn’t return per the hospital’s own guidelines.  

“I went to the head of the department, spoke to him. I spoke to the supervisor. I spoke to everyone. And now they’re all denying me and they’re firing me and saying job abandonment?” Virginia remembered. “I was devastated.” 

St. Barnabas Hospital declined to comment for this story. 

Virginia’s case is now in the hands of the New York City Commission on Human Rights, where it has been since she filed a complaint nearly a year and a half ago. It represents the many ways that domestic violence survivors are struggling to get workplace accommodations more than two decades since laws designed to protect survivors at work started to go into effect. Even in the places with the strongest protections — New York City’s law is considered model legislation — enforcement is difficult because domestic violence survivor employment laws don’t come with additional funding for enforcement agencies. Often, they are stacked on top of other civil rights cases at agencies that were already struggling to keep up with their caseload. 

And in the workplace, employers are still largely uninformed about their legal responsibilities to domestic violence survivors — a population that has limited resources and time to pursue a case if their employer does not comply with state laws. At the federal level, there is no legislation that addresses workplace accommodations for domestic violence survivors. 

Stalking survivors, mostly women, often ‘suffer in silence.’ We still don’t know how to stop it.

Forty-one percent of all women and a quarter of men experience sexual or physical violence or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime, according to 2022 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which does not collect data on nonbinary people. 

But data on domestic violence survivors and the workplace is extremely limited, making it difficult to drum up support for legislation, advocates said. One national study in 2005 found that 64 percent of domestic violence victims said their ability to work was impacted by the violence. About a fifth of the U.S. workforce identified as survivors in 2005, according to a nationally representative survey conducted at the time by the Corporate Alliance to End Partner Violence, a now-shuttered nonprofit that worked with businesses on the impacts of domestic violence in workplaces. About 20 percent of employers were offering training on domestic violence by 2013, according to a study by the national HR association, the Society for Human Resource Management. 

Only nine states and Washington, D.C., require workplace accommodations for survivors, according to Legal Momentum, a nonprofit legal advocacy organization for women that is representing Virginia pro bono. Some 13 states and D.C. prohibit firing someone based on their status as a survivor, and 36 states and D.C. have amended their unemployment insurance provisions to cover survivors. Currently, 15 states and D.C., as well as a number of cities and counties, have paid sick time laws that specifically include time off for domestic violence survivors to take time to get a restraining order or to relocate for safety. 

But just because those protections are there doesn’t mean they are being utilized.

“The problems we’re dealing with right now are employers are woefully unaware of existing legal requirements, and even those who are aware don’t necessarily take them that seriously, because I don’t think they are seeing that type of enforcement,” said Seher Khawaja, Virginia’s attorney at Legal Momentum. “It’s very difficult for survivors to find legal representation in these contexts. There are not many attorneys who are as well-versed in these cases.” 

The longer the enforcement takes, the “harder it is for survivors to get back on their feet,” Khawaja said. Since Virginia put in her complaint, the agency has interviewed her twice. She hasn’t heard anything since the last interview in March. 

The commission declined the 19th’s request for comment on the case “to preserve the integrity of our investigations,” but it did add that it has resolved 38 cases regarding domestic violence workplace discrimination since 2016, when New York City first launched a task force on domestic violence. The department received 110 inquiries in that time, though not all of them ended up becoming cases.

That represents a sliver of the roughly 10,500 other inquiries the commission receives each year. In its 2024 fiscal year funding, it was given funding to hire 17 more attorneys and support staff. It also invests in training and online resources to inform people about their rights as survivors, the commission said in a statement. 

Still, for survivors like Virginia, the wait is a barrier to her reaching the economic autonomy that would help move her and her children forward.

“I don’t think we think nearly enough about how profound the impact of domestic violence is on workplace sustainability for a survivor,” Khawaja said. “It comes into play when a survivor needs that financial independence most in their lives.”

Virginia was in the domestic violence shelter for 10 months trying to find other jobs with no luck. Her employer wouldn’t provide a recommendation letter, she said, and the termination made it hard for other employers to consider her application. A serious car accident in May 2021 was followed by a lengthy recovery that has made it even more difficult to find work. She’s since moved away from New York City. 

“When I think back about it, they took away my passion — I loved being an ultrasound tech and I loved my job. I just wish they could have just worked with me at the time, but I can’t go back,” she said. 

Protections for domestic violence survivors at work have come in waves since the mid-1990s, when the first laws were passed to give survivors access to unemployment insurance. 

Robin Runge, the attorney who has worked on most domestic violence workplace protection bills at the state and federal level from the start, said she came into the work because women were being left behind by the legal system. 

“I became aware of the epidemic nature of domestic violence and the struggles survivors face, and when I mean the struggles, I mean the abject racism, classism, sexism,” Runge said. “Most of my clients were Black and almost all of the judges were White men. The justice system was failing these people miserably, and it was a real wake-up call.”  

Workers constantly had questions about how they could support themselves and keep their jobs if they had to constantly go to court to get protection orders or for other legal needs to ensure their safety. 

The first couple pieces of state-level legislation Runge helped write allowed domestic violence survivors to still qualify for unemployment insurance if they lost a job for a reason relating to that abuse. Generally, people who leave jobs are not entitled to those benefits, but for domestic violence survivors, the reasons for leaving a job may be more complicated — they are often doing it to ensure their own safety or that of their coworkers.

The next wave of bills focused on securing unpaid leave for victims who needed time off but did not qualify for it. The federal Family and Medical Leave Act only offers workers unpaid time off if they’ve been at a job for at least a year.

Wendy Pollack, the founder and director of the Women’s Law and Policy Initiative at the Shriver Center on Poverty Law, worked on a lot of those early cases around leave. As a family law attorney, she remembers frequently hearing: “If I have to go to court one more time, I’m going to lose my job.” 

Pollack worked to draft a bill in Illinois called the Victims’ Economic Security and Safety Act that passed in 2004, which granted up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to victims of domestic violence to access anything from medical help to legal assistance. Barack Obama, a state senator at the time, was the sponsor of that legislation.

In the 20 years since, Pollack, Runge and others have worked to improve on the foundations those laws set, including making the leave paid instead of unpaid. Most recently, Minnesota passed paid sick leave that includes “safe time” for domestic violence survivors, which survivors can use to find safe housing, get a protection order or go to court, for example. They accrue time throughout the year with access to up to 48 hours of safe time available a year (up to six days if a worker follows an eight-hour work day). It will go into effect in 2024. 

Including safe time in the state laws has been standard since those laws started to pass in 2008 with D.C. — and earlier in San Francisco in 2006 — said Molly Weston Williamson, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank. All include full-time workers and at least some part-time workers, depending on whether the law includes a minimum hours worked per week requirement in order to qualify. Most do not. 

“As things were newer, there was more discussion and it required more work. I think we’ve hit a point in time in which it’s become more standard and more universal,” Weston Williamson said.

The next step for advocates now is getting protections for domestic violence survivors included in paid family and medical leave laws, which are separate from sick time and typically give workers up to 12 weeks of time off, time they could use to relocate, for example, or find child care for their kids if they’re in a shelter, like in Virginia’s case. Currently only six of the 13 states and D.C. that have paid family and medical leave laws include provisions for domestic violence survivors.

But despite how widespread it is becoming, many survivors still don’t know they have access to these protections. Advocacy groups are working to get more broad awareness on what’s in paid leave policies by working with shelters and other direct-service agencies to ensure they are informing survivors on their rights and by leading workplace trainings with employers. 

Currently only six of the 13 states and D.C. that have paid family and medical leave laws include provisions for domestic violence survivors. (GETTY IMAGES)

“What we have seen over and over again across the board is when you pass a law that gives people important new protections, the value of that law is really only in if people know about them and can use them,” Weston Williamson said. 

Raising awareness has also been a challenge with the most recent wave of domestic violence survivor protections regarding workplace accommodations. The majority of states that have enacted workplace accommodation statutes have tied them to the Americans with Disabilities Act. Workers would have to prove they have a disability brought on by their status as a domestic violence survivor, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, in order to get an accommodation. In New York City, they simply need to be a survivor to ask for an accommodation, which could range from a new shift, to not working at a front desk or getting a lock on their door. The law in New York is rare and has only been in effect since 2019. 

At the federal level, there’s been no success: Laws have been introduced to help domestic violence survivors since as early as 1996, and they’ve all stalled. It’s not dissimilar from the challenges with passing paid family and medical leave — all of those bills have passed at the state level but “we don’t have a prayer of doing it at a federal level,” said Sherry Leiwant, the co-founder and co-president of A Better Balance, a national nonprofit legal advocacy organization for women in the workplace. 

“With respect to employment rights it’s particularly hard because so many of our representatives, particularly at the federal level, are influenced by business interests. They just don’t want to interfere with business,” Leiwant said. “I think that’s one of the reasons we’ve been so successful at the state and local level. The balance is a little different.”

Even in the states, though, education for employees on their rights and training for employers on their responsibilities has fallen behind, quelling the impact of those laws that have passed. 

“As someone who worked on all of these things, what makes me sad is that very few people know these laws exist, including survivors. Very few people who work with survivors know these laws exist,” Runge said. “We are in an education breakdown.”

 A couple years ago, she worked on a project talking to state enforcement agencies in five states. Most knew very little about the laws and had nothing on their websites with information for survivors, Runge said. 

The other reason survivors are struggling to get restitution is that additional funding for the resources needed to ensure that training and education is not there. The laws that relate to domestic violence survivors don’t include any additional funding other than what is already budgeted for enforcement agencies. 

“When we tried to get this legislation passed, we gave up on anything that would create a fiscal note, to be honest,” Runge said. “Maybe we should have said then we’re not going to pass it. What we ended up with is an unfunded mandate, and this is a recipe for disaster.” 

One thing that could make a big difference is ensuring survivors know their rights, avoiding the legal challenges Virginia is currently facing. 

“Callers will call us and we’ll say this law protects you and, more often than not, armed with that going to an employer — and [the] employer will not know about it either — the employer will say, ‘Oh I didn’t realize that,” Leiwant said.

Khawaja and the team at Legal Momentum are currently working with the state of New York to strengthen its laws to require employer training on domestic violence survivors laws, a lesson taken from the success of sexual harassment training in the wake of the #MeToo movement. 

That’s the path forward, advocates said. So much attention has been paid to sexual harassment at work, when it’s not dissimilar from harassment that happens outside the workplace. Connecting those dots could be the key to unlocking more protections for survivors, Runge said.

“This is happening everywhere, and this demarcation of it happens at home — you get these; and at work — you get these,” doesn’t make sense anymore, Runge said. “We as women experience this everywhere.” 

The violence had escalated for years before one day in October 2020, when Virginia’s husband threatened her life in front of her two children. She fled. The three of them hid in a domestic violence shelter in New York City as a global pandemic raged. 

Virginia, whose full name is being withheld to protect her safety, wondered how she would care for her children. She was their sole caregiver, and most child care options had shuttered in the pandemic. Her shift at work as an ultrasound tech ran until 10 p.m. every weeknight, an hour past the shelter’s curfew. 

The only thing that made sense was asking for an earlier shift. The day after fleeing her husband, Virginia arrived to work at St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx, where she’d been a tech for more than six years, with her 4- and 5-year-old and a letter from the shelter explaining to the head of the radiology department that she’d need a new schedule. Under New York City law, employers are required to accommodate workplace requests from domestic violence survivors unless it would create an “undue hardship” for the business. They’re also required to engage in a discussion with the worker to try to accommodate their needs.

Instead, Virginia said she was told to take time off to handle her situation. When she returned a week later, she was told that no one in the ultrasound department had been consulted about her request, and she was asked to take two more weeks of leave because the department remained “concerned for her well-being.” They would have to be unpaid weeks, however, because she’d used all her paid time off. 

“That’s when I start realizing they are not doing anything,” Virginia told The 19th. 

Forty-one percent of all women and a quarter of men experience sexual or physical violence or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime, according to 2022 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

By the end of October, she was told the department could not accommodate her shift change or her extended leave — the one she said she’d been told to go on. And after she didn’t show up to work on her original return date because she fell ill with COVID-19, she got an email from the HR department: She had been fired for what they claimed was “job abandonment.” The termination letter made no mention of her request for accommodations three weeks earlier, or the fact that she’d communicated that she had COVID and couldn’t return per the hospital’s own guidelines.  

“I went to the head of the department, spoke to him. I spoke to the supervisor. I spoke to everyone. And now they’re all denying me and they’re firing me and saying job abandonment?” Virginia remembered. “I was devastated.” 

St. Barnabas Hospital declined to comment for this story. 

Virginia’s case is now in the hands of the New York City Commission on Human Rights, where it has been since she filed a complaint nearly a year and a half ago. It represents the many ways that domestic violence survivors are struggling to get workplace accommodations more than two decades since laws designed to protect survivors at work started to go into effect. Even in the places with the strongest protections — New York City’s law is considered model legislation — enforcement is difficult because domestic violence survivor employment laws don’t come with additional funding for enforcement agencies. Often, they are stacked on top of other civil rights cases at agencies that were already struggling to keep up with their caseload. 

And in the workplace, employers are still largely uninformed about their legal responsibilities to domestic violence survivors — a population that has limited resources and time to pursue a case if their employer does not comply with state laws. At the federal level, there is no legislation that addresses workplace accommodations for domestic violence survivors. 

Forty-one percent of all women and a quarter of men experience sexual or physical violence or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime, according to 2022 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which does not collect data on nonbinary people. 

But data on domestic violence survivors and the workplace is extremely limited, making it difficult to drum up support for legislation, advocates said. One national study in 2005 found that 64 percent of domestic violence victims said their ability to work was impacted by the violence. About a fifth of the U.S. workforce identified as survivors in 2005, according to a nationally representative survey conducted at the time by the Corporate Alliance to End Partner Violence, a now-shuttered nonprofit that worked with businesses on the impacts of domestic violence in workplaces. About 20 percent of employers were offering training on domestic violence by 2013, according to a study by the national HR association, the Society for Human Resource Management. 

Only nine states and Washington, D.C., require workplace accommodations for survivors, according to Legal Momentum, a nonprofit legal advocacy organization for women that is representing Virginia pro bono. Some 13 states and D.C. prohibit firing someone based on their status as a survivor, and 36 states and D.C. have amended their unemployment insurance provisions to cover survivors. Currently, 15 states and D.C., as well as a number of cities and counties, have paid sick time laws that specifically include time off for domestic violence survivors to take time to get a restraining order or to relocate for safety. 

But just because those protections are there doesn’t mean they are being utilized.

“The problems we’re dealing with right now are employers are woefully unaware of existing legal requirements, and even those who are aware don’t necessarily take them that seriously, because I don’t think they are seeing that type of enforcement,” said Seher Khawaja, Virginia’s attorney at Legal Momentum. “It’s very difficult for survivors to find legal representation in these contexts. There are not many attorneys who are as well-versed in these cases.” 

The longer the enforcement takes, the “harder it is for survivors to get back on their feet,” Khawaja said. Since Virginia put in her complaint, the agency has interviewed her twice. She hasn’t heard anything since the last interview in March. 

The commission declined the 19th’s request for comment on the case “to preserve the integrity of our investigations,” but it did add that it has resolved 38 cases regarding domestic violence workplace discrimination since 2016, when New York City first launched a task force on domestic violence. The department received 110 inquiries in that time, though not all of them ended up becoming cases.

That represents a sliver of the roughly 10,500 other inquiries the commission receives each year. In its 2024 fiscal year funding, it was given funding to hire 17 more attorneys and support staff. It also invests in training and online resources to inform people about their rights as survivors, the commission said in a statement. 

Still, for survivors like Virginia, the wait is a barrier to her reaching the economic autonomy that would help move her and her children forward.

“I don’t think we think nearly enough about how profound the impact of domestic violence is on workplace sustainability for a survivor,” Khawaja said. “It comes into play when a survivor needs that financial independence most in their lives.”

Virginia was in the domestic violence shelter for 10 months trying to find other jobs with no luck. Her employer wouldn’t provide a recommendation letter, she said, and the termination made it hard for other employers to consider her application. A serious car accident in May 2021 was followed by a lengthy recovery that has made it even more difficult to find work. She’s since moved away from New York City. 

“When I think back about it, they took away my passion — I loved being an ultrasound tech and I loved my job. I just wish they could have just worked with me at the time, but I can’t go back,” she said. 

Protections for domestic violence survivors at work have come in waves since the mid-1990s, when the first laws were passed to give survivors access to unemployment insurance. 

Robin Runge, the attorney who has worked on most domestic violence workplace protection bills at the state and federal level from the start, said she came into the work because women were being left behind by the legal system. 

“I became aware of the epidemic nature of domestic violence and the struggles survivors face, and when I mean the struggles, I mean the abject racism, classism, sexism,” Runge said. “Most of my clients were Black and almost all of the judges were White men. The justice system was failing these people miserably, and it was a real wake-up call.”  

Workers constantly had questions about how they could support themselves and keep their jobs if they had to constantly go to court to get protection orders or for other legal needs to ensure their safety. 

The first couple pieces of state-level legislation Runge helped write allowed domestic violence survivors to still qualify for unemployment insurance if they lost a job for a reason relating to that abuse. Generally, people who leave jobs are not entitled to those benefits, but for domestic violence survivors, the reasons for leaving a job may be more complicated — they are often doing it to ensure their own safety or that of their coworkers.

The next wave of bills focused on securing unpaid leave for victims who needed time off but did not qualify for it. The federal Family and Medical Leave Act only offers workers unpaid time off if they’ve been at a job for at least a year.

Wendy Pollack, the founder and director of the Women’s Law and Policy Initiative at the Shriver Center on Poverty Law, worked on a lot of those early cases around leave. As a family law attorney, she remembers frequently hearing: “If I have to go to court one more time, I’m going to lose my job.” 

Pollack worked to draft a bill in Illinois called the Victims’ Economic Security and Safety Act that passed in 2004, which granted up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to victims of domestic violence to access anything from medical help to legal assistance. Barack Obama, a state senator at the time, was the sponsor of that legislation.

In the 20 years since, Pollack, Runge and others have worked to improve on the foundations those laws set, including making the leave paid instead of unpaid. Most recently, Minnesota passed paid sick leave that includes “safe time” for domestic violence survivors, which survivors can use to find safe housing, get a protection order or go to court, for example. They accrue time throughout the year with access to up to 48 hours of safe time available a year (up to six days if a worker follows an eight-hour work day). It will go into effect in 2024. 

Including safe time in the state laws has been standard since those laws started to pass in 2008 with D.C. — and earlier in San Francisco in 2006 — said Molly Weston Williamson, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank. All include full-time workers and at least some part-time workers, depending on whether the law includes a minimum hours worked per week requirement in order to qualify. Most do not. 

“As things were newer, there was more discussion and it required more work. I think we’ve hit a point in time in which it’s become more standard and more universal,” Weston Williamson said.

The next step for advocates now is getting protections for domestic violence survivors included in paid family and medical leave laws, which are separate from sick time and typically give workers up to 12 weeks of time off, time they could use to relocate, for example, or find child care for their kids if they’re in a shelter, like in Virginia’s case. Currently only six of the 13 states and D.C. that have paid family and medical leave laws include provisions for domestic violence survivors.

But despite how widespread it is becoming, many survivors still don’t know they have access to these protections. Advocacy groups are working to get more broad awareness on what’s in paid leave policies by working with shelters and other direct-service agencies to ensure they are informing survivors on their rights and by leading workplace trainings with employers. 

Currently only six of the 13 states and D.C. that have paid family and medical leave laws include provisions for domestic violence survivors. (GETTY IMAGES)

“What we have seen over and over again across the board is when you pass a law that gives people important new protections, the value of that law is really only in if people know about them and can use them,” Weston Williamson said. 

Raising awareness has also been a challenge with the most recent wave of domestic violence survivor protections regarding workplace accommodations. The majority of states that have enacted workplace accommodation statutes have tied them to the Americans with Disabilities Act. Workers would have to prove they have a disability brought on by their status as a domestic violence survivor, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, in order to get an accommodation. In New York City, they simply need to be a survivor to ask for an accommodation, which could range from a new shift, to not working at a front desk or getting a lock on their door. The law in New York is rare and has only been in effect since 2019. 

At the federal level, there’s been no success: Laws have been introduced to help domestic violence survivors since as early as 1996, and they’ve all stalled. It’s not dissimilar from the challenges with passing paid family and medical leave — all of those bills have passed at the state level but “we don’t have a prayer of doing it at a federal level,” said Sherry Leiwant, the co-founder and co-president of A Better Balance, a national nonprofit legal advocacy organization for women in the workplace. 

“With respect to employment rights it’s particularly hard because so many of our representatives, particularly at the federal level, are influenced by business interests. They just don’t want to interfere with business,” Leiwant said. “I think that’s one of the reasons we’ve been so successful at the state and local level. The balance is a little different.”

Even in the states, though, education for employees on their rights and training for employers on their responsibilities has fallen behind, quelling the impact of those laws that have passed. 

“As someone who worked on all of these things, what makes me sad is that very few people know these laws exist, including survivors. Very few people who work with survivors know these laws exist,” Runge said. “We are in an education breakdown.”

 A couple years ago, she worked on a project talking to state enforcement agencies in five states. Most knew very little about the laws and had nothing on their websites with information for survivors, Runge said. 

The other reason survivors are struggling to get restitution is that additional funding for the resources needed to ensure that training and education is not there. The laws that relate to domestic violence survivors don’t include any additional funding other than what is already budgeted for enforcement agencies. 

“When we tried to get this legislation passed, we gave up on anything that would create a fiscal note, to be honest,” Runge said. “Maybe we should have said then we’re not going to pass it. What we ended up with is an unfunded mandate, and this is a recipe for disaster.” 

One thing that could make a big difference is ensuring survivors know their rights, avoiding the legal challenges Virginia is currently facing. 

“Callers will call us and we’ll say this law protects you and, more often than not, armed with that going to an employer — and [the] employer will not know about it either — the employer will say, ‘Oh I didn’t realize that,” Leiwant said.

Khawaja and the team at Legal Momentum are currently working with the state of New York to strengthen its laws to require employer training on domestic violence survivors laws, a lesson taken from the success of sexual harassment training in the wake of the #MeToo movement. 

That’s the path forward, advocates said. So much attention has been paid to sexual harassment at work, when it’s not dissimilar from harassment that happens outside the workplace. Connecting those dots could be the key to unlocking more protections for survivors, Runge said.

“This is happening everywhere, and this demarcation of it happens at home — you get these; and at work — you get these,” doesn’t make sense anymore, Runge said. “We as women experience this everywhere.” 

 This story was originally published by The 19th.

 

 

 

From the esteemed non-profit organization and mighty protector of our democracy, Common Cause, comes this report about who is responsible for some of the most extreme far-right legislation passed in state legislatures in recent years.

Some of the most important upcoming fights for our democracy will happen in the states – not in Washington, D.C.

And one major threat is a group you may never have heard of: ALEC.

ALEC is the acronym for the innocent-sounding American Legislative Exchange Council. Except in reality... it’s anything but. Beneath the benign name lies an extremist group of lobbyists funded by the Kochs and big corporations, working to ram far-right legislation through state legislatures.

ALEC is responsible for some of the most extreme, ultra-conservative state laws passed in the last decade: disinformation-fueled voter suppression laws, “Stand Your Ground” gun legislation, handouts to polluting corporations, and blocking the Affordable Care Act at the state level, among others.

 ALEC is getting ready for the 2024 legislative sessions in the states – and planning even more extreme laws in states across the country. Stifling the right to peaceful protest; advancing a dangerous Article V Constitutional Convention and radical attacks against LGBTQ+ people.

We have mobilized to stop them – and defend our civil rights, voting rights, and every other right you and I hold dear.

ALEC’s member companies pay top dollar for direct access to state lawmakers – who allow lobbyists to write corporate dream legislation into ALEC “model bills.” Then, ALEC-backed legislators rush those bills through their state houses, churning out laws that enrich corporations and hurt the rest of us.

But we have a plan to stop ALEC… and it’s working. You see, major corporations don’t want to be publicly associated with ALEC’s overwhelmingly unpopular and extreme agenda. And up until very recently, ALEC has been able to operate from the shadows – quietly pulling the strings to advance their right-wing policies.

But in the past few years, people’s action groups like Common Cause have exposed ALEC for what it is – and put MAJOR pressure on companies to cut ties with them.

Already, some of ALEC’s biggest funders – AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, and Pfizer – responded to our demands by canceling their ALEC membership. They’ve joined Google, Coca-Cola, and other major companies in a sweeping exodus from ALEC’s toxic brand.

I’ve seen it firsthand... our strategy hits ALEC where it hurts. They don’t have grassroots members and don’t represent anyone besides major corporations – so if we keep making clear to corporations and their customers what sort of extreme agenda they’re backing (and the public disgust that goes along with it), ALEC loses its power.

AND… it’s clear they’re running scared. ALEC has threatened Common Cause and our coalition partners with legal action multiple times. But all we’re doing is putting ALEC’s extreme agenda out in the open and letting it speak for itself – which is a truth they can’t keep hiding from.

Despite all this, major companies like UPS and State Farm Insurance continue to support ALEC. We need your help to expose their involvement and hold these corporations accountable.

Viki Harrison, Director of Constitutional Convention & Protect Dissent Programs