Fear is a terrible thing – it blights lives, contaminating our everyday experience with both physical and mental stress.
Many of us take a safe working environment for granted. But there are millions of workers for whom safety cannot be guaranteed. We accept that some professions involve danger – police, firefighters, soldiers. We applaud those who take up these professions and – we hope – they are rewarded adequately for their courage.
But there are millions of other workers – often earning little more than the minimum wage – who receive far less recognition, and for whom violence is an occupational hazard.
Many staff who come in contact with the public can be vulnerable to abuse and even violence. The care worker – dealing with patients with dementia and families under duress; the shop staff – trying to help stressed and angry customers; and the bus driver, ferrying passengers who have had a drink-fuelled night out.
While responsible companies and trade unions are working together to try to reduce the potential for violence against their staff, incidents are still too high:
• Usdaw’s latest survey of shop staff showed four per cent had suffered a violent attack in the last year – an equivalent of 120,000 assaults.
• Unison recorded nearly 35,000 attacks on their members during 2012, in Scotland alone.
Staff who work with the public find an attack particularly traumatising. They usually have to spend every working day in the same situation in which they were attacked.
Kim, a store manager who was attacked by a prolific shoplifter, described the effect on her:
‘To be sworn at and spat at makes me feel disgusting. I had no end of sickness because of the stress. I have worked for five years and never had a day off. But now I am asking myself whether it is worth carrying on.’
Victims rightly feel that sentencing should reflect these effects on their lives. Sadly, too often it does not.
The security guard at a store, stabbed with a needle by a thief, who then suffered months of trauma waiting for test results for HIV and hepatitis, did not feel that the attacker’s small fine was in any way an adequate sentence for what he and his family had endured.
The shopworker, who was chased out of her store to her home by a thief she accosted for taking a packet of pork scratchings, who was then racially abused and attacked in front of her children, with chunks of her hair pulled out, saw her attacker – who had just walked free from court after an assault on a man with learning disabilities – again walk away with a suspended sentence.
Even worse are the cases where an attacker is not even charged, even when an assault has been witnessed – and sometimes caught on CCTV.
Like Holly, a retail assistant from Dorset, was assaulted by a suspected shoplifter. She was hit forcefully in the face, causing whiplash, and verbally abused. She made an official complaint of assault and gave a statement to the police. The perpetrator was not charged, despite being well known to the police.
Many of these innocent victims are attacked because they are seeking to uphold the law – the transport staff, seeking to make sure all customers pay their fare, the security guard looking to stop a theft, or the shopworker ensuring that alcohol is not purchased without proof of age.
I believe that we should do as much as we can to protect those who work on the frontline – and to make sure we give sufficient deterrent to potential attackers, who currently seem to think it is fair game to attack someone, who is just doing their job.
In Scotland we have seen encouraging results from the previous Labour government’s creation of a specific offence of assaulting emergency workers, with over 1,000 prosecutions to date under the Emergency Workers Act.
I believe that all workers who deal with the public should be offered a similar level of protection, and that is why I will be introducing an amendment to the antisocial behaviour, crime and policing bill to legislate for a specific offence of assaulting someone who works with the public, in the course of their employment.
At the moment, this is classed as an aggravating factor in an offence. But it is just one of 19 such factors, and experience of prosecutions and sentencing shows that it is often not enough to see justice done.
I was saddened to see the Tories and Lib Dems combine to defeat the amendment brought in the Commons by Jack Dromey MP last month. I believe that the Lords will give the issue more consideration and support.
Anyone who lives or works in fear needs to know someone is on their side. I am proud to be able to say that on this issue, as on so many others, Labour is on their side.
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George Foulkes is a member of the House of Lords. He tweets @GeorgeFoulkes. Find out more about Usdaw’s Freedom From Fear Week