Many teens may experience workplace violence

As many as one in three teenagers may have been on the receiving end of violence or abuse at work, survey findings suggest.

“Most working teenagers and their parents probably do not think that workplace violence is something they need to be concerned about, but they should,” Dr. Kimberly J. Rauscher told Reuters Health.

In the US, most teens work in the retail sector which involves a great deal of customer contact and cash handling - both known risk factors for workplace violence and criminal activity, said Rauscher, from the Injury Prevention Research Center, University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

Yet, outside of occupational injury surveillance tallies of actual injuries from workplace violence, “there are (sic) very little data on the types of violence that US youth, ages 14 to 17, suffer, and the perpetrators of these acts,” Rauscher notes.

She, therefore, assessed the incidence of workplace violence among 1,171 students at a Lowell, Massachusetts high school. Fifty-four percent were female and most had worked for less than 2 years on average.

Overall, 51 percent were non-Hispanic white, 38 percent were Asian, and the remaining were black, Hispanic, or of other ethnicity.

In the American Journal of Industrial Medicine, Rauscher reports 10 percent of the teens said they had been physically attacked, another 10 percent felt they were sexually harassed, and 25 percent said they had been verbally threatened.

Of the teens reporting physical attacks, 31 percent came from a customer. Customers also accounted for 34 percent of the sexual harassment and 55 percent of the verbal threats.

Co-workers accounted for 29 percent of the reported physical attacks, 30 percent of the verbal threats, and nearly 45 percent of the sexual harassment.

Rauscher found it particularly troubling that supervisors, with the responsibility of protecting young people in the workplace, accounted for 18, 27, and 32 percent of the reported physical attacks, verbal threats, and sexual harassment.

These findings should be confirmed in a nationally representative study, Rauscher said. Further research should also assess risk factors unique to youth, as well as how violence impacts their well-being.

SOURCE: American Journal of Industrial Medicine, July 2008.

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