Unto whom much is given, of him shall much be required.
Luke 12:48
My family and I used to run a stable and equestrian center in central Texas, and one summer we had an employee who was maliciously harassed by an ex boyfriend. We dealt with it successfully, but there were times when we honestly didn’t know what we needed to do. It was a small but thriving business with a nice mix of high-end Thoroughbreds, Quarter Horses and scrubby little Mustangs, but anyone who has ever been in the stable business knows your clients aren’t the horses--they’re the horses’ owners.
And our clients were nervous because the idiot in question kept coming by our place when I was at work, hell bent on following his crying ex “fiancé” around the stables and repeatedly asking her why she wouldn’t talk to him anymore. Eventually he would throw a profane hissy fit and leave in his pickup fast enough to make everyone jump out of the way and cough dust for half an hour. The woman was still in her teens, a darling little thing who became one with the saddle and animal when she rode, and who found life’s true joy in working where she knew she was valued and in a place where she could be around horses all day long. It seemed particularly unfair to rob someone of that kind of happiness by stalking them like you own them.
The horse owners were just out there to enjoy nature and be with their animals (who often ate better than I did), and this guy’s little rants were upsetting to them, the ex girlfriend, and to all the horses. Horses don’t so much like to be upset, and their owners knew it, so it took about two of these scenes before the complaints started flooding in.
Mind you, these were complaints about our business. No one blamed us for the problem, but the expectations were understandably high that something be done about it, and rightfully so.
We banned him from the property and meant it when we said we’d prosecute him for trespassing if he came back, so he took to waiting one hundred yards outside our gate for her to get off work. This was concerning because I knew he had access to weapons, and he seemed particularly unbalanced during those hot summer weeks. This created a unique predicament because as the property owner, I felt responsible for my employee, all of our clients, all of the horses and, of course, my own family. Our boys were young at the time, and I was honestly scared for them. Another concern was the fact that our barn was filled with a particularly dry, combustible substance called hay, and I didn’t put it past our idiot to seek retaliation by burning our barn. It was a prickly, confusing time.
The happy ending is that she eventually got a protection order, and he seemed to lose all interest in her after spending two nights in jail for violating the order. Go figure. He seemed like such a determined fellow, but forty-eight hours in the pokey resulted in his leaving Texas and moving to one of the Dakotas.
The horses seemed most content of all.
Consider about the many complexities of our situation: We had an employee who had every right to be frightened and alarmed; animals that would have been defenseless had the offender gotten it into his head to snipe them with his rifle from the abundant woods around our place; our clients who were annoyed and worried enough that some were considering taking their business elsewhere; highly valuable and easily destroyable property; and most precious of all, our own children toddling about the property, all but oblivious to the tons of horse flesh and hooves, wild animals out in the woods, and the potential maniac who kept trying to drop by. It was through a combination of good communication, utilization of the criminal justice system, determination that he would not be allowed to continue disrupting all of our lives, and an absolutely loyal stand by our employee that eventually won the day.
Which brings us to the thematic question for this chapter: Do employers have a responsibility to offer assistance to an employee who is the victim of intimate partner violence and/or stalking? If you’ve read this blog previously, chances are your answer is yes. Your answer will likely be followed by a question such as, “How much should a company do, and how involved should a business be in the private life of any individual employee?”
An employer’s responsibility is, first and foremost, to operate a profitable business. If he or she fails to do this one thing, nothing else really matters. In other words, if the business fails, no one has a job. Yes, we hope that all employers, from the two-employee mom-and-pop store to the multinational corporation care about the lives of the people who work for them, but the mission is the bottom line.
So, let’s talk about the bottom line. For the purposes of discussion, let’s pretend that you, the reader, are an employer in a company that sells--I don’t know--light bulbs. Yes, you’re the owner of the Light Bulb Store, famous in your community for selling the highest quality light bulbs at the lowest prices. Your logo is a bright yellow light bulb with a huge smile, and your tag line is, “We brighten your day with prices you’ll flip for!” (“Flip” the light switch…made that up myself.)
Things are swell and business is booming until you sit down one day with your accountant and learn that a new business is moving in next door. That business, Ralph’s Toxic Chemical Outlet, has another store in a different part of town. Ralph’s first store is located next to a business that sells lampshades. The lampshade business used to do quite well until Ralph moved in, but then customers started getting affected by the chemical fumes, employees started calling in sick more often, or being distracted to the point of inefficiency about such matters as whether the exposure to Ralph’s toxins would be the death of them. Ralph himself is kind of an obnoxious fellow, often cursing and spitting out on the sidewalk in front of the lampshade store, and the result has been that what had once been a thriving little lamp shade business is now starting to go under because Ralph won’t control his toxins or keep his filthy habits to himself.
What would you do if you were the owner of the Light Bulb Store and you learned that Ralph was planning to move in next door? Would you demand that your landlord stop the deal? Would you use the courts to bar him from setting up a shop knowing his business will kill yours? Would you use every law and ordinance at your disposal to keep Ralph in line if he did go into business next door? This is your livelihood we’re talking about here. How much are you willing to take from Ralph?
Now let’s say the toxins aren’t chemical in nature. Instead, they are the toxins that spread in the form of fear, hate, and dread. In this scenario, Ralph isn’t the owner of a cruddy business; now he’s a guy who has lost his wife because he beat on her, threatened her, and generally made her life a living hell while she was with him. She finally got tired of it, and now she’s moved out. Ralph doesn’t know where she lives yet, but he sure knows where she works. And it is that place of employment that becomes his primary focus for regaining control of the very person he cannot imagine not controlling.
Ralph has two ideas in mind. First and foremost he is going to make her come back to him because the thought of losing control over someone who he most enjoyed manipulating in the whole world is, to a control freak like Ralph, completely unacceptable. Second, Ralph is going to make her pay for leaving him, and he probably doesn’t care much about anyone else around her.
There are a couple of ways Ralph can accomplish both of these agenda items at the same time. If he can make her life at work so intolerable that she gets in trouble and gets fired, he has simultaneously manufactured a scenario in which she must once again depend on him and made perhaps the one good part of her life miserable.
Generally in cases such as this the Ralph’s of the world will start with multiple phone calls to her place of employment. I’ve had cases in which these guys will call fifty and one hundred times a day, and not answering the ring isn’t an option because customers call in on those same lines. Imagine trying to operate a business or stay on track with a project if you have to answer the phone literally every two or three minutes.
At some point in the day during all these calls, a supervisor gets wind of the fact that an employee is receiving multiple calls from her boyfriend. The supervisor tells her she needs to stop taking personal calls at work. This is a nasty rock and hard place. She knows she’s about to get in trouble, she’s probably very embarrassed to be receiving this kind of scrutiny, and she knows with certainty that Ralph isn’t going to stop calling unless she does what he wants. Eventually she acquiesces, agreeing to meet Ralph for a talk after her shift if he’ll stop calling her work. Ralph is happy and stops calling for a while. Ralph has also learned a new control technique, one that he plans to use many more times in the future to get her to talk to him, get her to have sex with him, and even get her to move back in with him.
The next tactic often employed by controlling, violent personalities is to start showing up at her work. In some cases this means being there in the parking lot a few minutes before the start or end of her shift. Often this means she must endure a torrent of profanities, pleadings, apologies, promises and threats during the walk from her car to the building. Imagine starting your work day under this kind of pressure, knowing that even if you do make it safely into the building, he’s going to start the onslaught of phone calls right after the door closes behind you.
If that isn’t bad enough, the thought of him being out in the parking lot to meet you after work is worse. In this instance, the woman now has to deal with the fact that she has no built-in excuse for why she can’t stop and talk to him. She isn’t “running late” for work, so he’ll demand to know why she won’t just “give him a chance.” The fact that he beat the crap out of her two nights earlier doesn’t register for him because he is a narcissistic bully who is only thinking about the fact that she won’t do what she wants him to do.
Worse yet, she now has to contend with the fact that he will most likely follow her when she drives off the lot. He likely knows where she lives, where her children go to day care, knows her friend, where she buys groceries and does her banking. There is no real sense that she can get away from him, and in so many tragic instances, that parking lot scene is where her resolve to stay away from him erodes in a pool of despair and fatigue. She agrees to dinner, during which he will be at least as charming as he was when they first met, and by the next morning they are back together again.
Ralph scores another control hit, and the cycle repeats itself.
In some cases Ralph’s incessant behavior still doesn’t sway her to meet with him, give him another chance, or get her to come back. Often this causes Ralph to take his game to a new level. Many times these guys will call employers and make complaints about her customer service or “inform” her boss that she needs to be drug tested or investigated for embezzlement.
Ultimately, if none of these tactics work, some stalkers will take it even one more level, and that may include actual physical attacks on the subject of his obsession, her co-worker, and/or anyone else who happens to get in the way of his objective to make her come back and to make her life miserable in the process.
All of these tactics cause problems for an employer. A supervisor obviously won’t like it if some jackass is calling incessantly and tying up phone lines, causing his employees to be distracted and upset, generating unfounded complaints that must be investigated, or putting the staff in actual physical danger. This activity wastes time, resources and money, wastes that systematically chip away at the company’s profitability.
Given that, an employer has two options: Get rid of the target employee or help her get rid of the jackass. It’s really as simple as that, though both options carry unique challenges, responsibilities, and risks.
Next Post: The Job Hunt, Part II: What Employers Can Do
It could have had a very different turn out had you handled it differently with the young lady that worked for you. She is no longer a victim, she is a survivor-
ReplyDeleteImagine if all employers stood up to jackasses!