Addressing Staff Safety at High-Risk Social Assistance Offices

Abstract

Through the course of their work, social workers face potential threats to their personal safety, including abuse and even violence from the very people they are trying to help. Because of the high-risk environment of social assistance offices, there is a growing need to ensure that proper security measures are in place. This paper presents a case study where primary, situational, and tertiary prevention and security measures were developed for a social assistance office in a mid-sized Canadian city, following a particularly fearsome incident. Client-initiated violence against social workers is of particular relevance to women's security, because women are often disproportionately represented in public-sector help-giving professions such as social work. Indeed, in the case study used for this paper, 86 per cent of the social assistance office staff were women. An important lesson that can be learned from this example is that increasing the security of social assistance offices cannot simply be a function of situational measures, but must also address the primary causal factors that give rise to threats to the safety of social workers.