Domestic violence–a management challenge: how trade unions can help

Domestic violence is a key workplace gender equality issue. Although domestic violence affects everyone, it is predominantly women who are the victims and who suffer from the most severe abuse. This chapter focuses on female employees in the United Kingdom. While rarely acknowledged in UK literature or practice, domestic violence can also affect women at work. It can hamper their performance, attendance and career development. Furthermore, perpetrators can continue the abuse at the workplace. Conversely the workplace can be a haven from domestic violence, offering support and resources. Yet far too often employers lack the capacity and capability to handle domestic violence, resulting in many victims losing their job. Our research explored the role played by trade unions in domestic violence cases, and found that representatives were a source of support for both victims and organizations in helping them better handle domestic violence in the workplace

Behavioral correlations across activity, mating, exploration, aggression, and antipredator contexts in the European house cricket, Acheta domesticus

Recently, there has been increasing interest in behavioral syndrome research across a range of taxa. Behavioral syndromes are suites of correlated behaviors that are expressed either within a given behavioral context (e. g., mating) or between different contexts (e. g., foraging and mating). Syndrome research holds profound implications for animal behavior as it promotes a holistic view in which seemingly autonomous behaviors may not evolve independently, but as a "suite" or "package." We tested whether laboratory-reared male and female European house crickets, Acheta domesticus, exhibited behavioral syndromes by quantifying individual differences in activity, exploration, mate attraction, aggressiveness, and antipredator behavior. To our knowledge, our study is the first to consider such a breadth of behavioral traits in one organism using the syndrome framework. We found positive correlations across mating, exploratory, and antipredatory contexts, but not aggression and general activity. These behavioral differences were not correlated with body size or condition, although age explained some of the variation in motivation to mate. We suggest that these across-context correlations represent a boldness syndrome as individual risk-taking and exploration was central to across-context mating and antipredation correlations in both sexes. © Springer-Verlag 2009