Less than 1 per cent of workers complain about bullying and harassment to peak bodies, writes Sapphire Parsons.
On 28 April 2024, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declared that Australia is experiencing a national crisis of gender-based violence, saying: “This is a national crisis. It’s not just governments’ problem. It’s a problem of our entire society.”
Australia now faces a critical moment in safety regulatory reform. When the risk is serious harm or death, as it is with work-related gendered violence, regulatory intervention is imperative. Yet, our current safety laws and regulations remain silent on this issue. This gap leaves women, especially those from high-risk groups, vulnerable to violence both at work and at home.
With recommendation 7(f) of the 2024 Unlocking the Prevention Potential Report and recommendation 5 of the House standing committee’s 2012 report, Workplace Bullying: We Just Want It to Stop, recommending embedding the Respect@Work reforms, and workplace bullying prevention in work health and safety regulations, Australia now has an opportunity to be a world leader in primary prevention of work-related gendered violence.
We led the way on 10 November 2015, under then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, when we adopted an evidence-based national approach to preventing gender-based violence. Australia’s then-Senator, the Honourable Michaelia Cash, called for Australia to “address the root cause of domestic violence and violence against women – gender inequality and a lack of respect”.
The Change the Story Framework centres primary prevention of gendered violence, which, at its core, is concerned with addressing harmful attitudes and beliefs, together with power imbalances in private and public life. This framework recognises that violence and gender inequality exist in relation to multiple and intersecting systems of sexism, racism, colonialism, classism, heteronormativity, cisnormativity, homo-, bi- and transphobia, ageism and their corresponding systems of power and privilege.
These intersections create systems of structured inequality, characterised by unequal distribution of power, wealth, income and social status, which drive violence against women and under-represented groups.
Australia’s current national approach to managing workplace behavioural harm is not focused on prevention; it’s focused on response
A key reason Australian workplaces continue to experience behavioural harm at scale is because our current approach to managing behavioural harm is not focused on prevention, and it is instead focused on response. Despite the Respect@Work reforms, notably, the Australian Human Rights Commission still requires a reasonable suspicion of after-the-fact non-compliance with the positive duty in relation to sex discrimination before it can commence an inquiry (see s 35B of the Australian Human Rights Commission Act 1986 (Cth)).
Resultingly, in a workplace context, this looks like an over-reliance on training, policies and procedures, rather than seeking to ensure intersectional representation in leadership roles. Policies, procedures, training and reporting pathways are secondary and tertiary prevention approaches that are concerned with behavioural change and response, after the damage is done. They do not shift power, and, resultingly, do not do enough to prevent harm.
Indeed, research in comparable jurisdictions, which considered 30 years of training, found that there was no evidence that training affected the frequency of sexual harassment in the workplace, concluding, “much of the training done over the last 30 years has not worked as a prevention tool”.
The Australian Human Rights Commission itself has noted that workplace sexual harassment is about gender and power (see page 24). Similarly, Safe Work Australia has recognised that harassment and bullying are common tactics used to maintain the status quo of personal power or power distribution in workplaces, noting that 62.3 per cent of bullying perpetrators were reported to be a supervisor, which lends itself to this hypothesis (see page 6).
Similarly, a 2025 report involving the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, Bankwest and Curtin University indicated that gender imbalances in leadership are not only markers of gender inequality but that they are also capable of predicting exposure to psychosocial hazards, noting that higher resignation rates among women within an organisation are capable of signalling issues with workplace culture.
That Australia’s current approach to addressing harmful behaviour at work is not working is evident in the extent of the harm experienced, and the comparatively low number of complaints that are made to peak bodies like the Australian Human Rights Commission and Fair Work Commission.
In attempting to assess prevalence rates, data from the Australian Human Rights Commission has been considered, which has previously found that one in five people have been sexually harassed at work in the past 12 months (noting that there are separate prevalence rates for the past five years, which suggest that one in three have been harassed at work over the past five years).
Similarly, Safe Work Australia’s 2016 report, Bullying & Harassment in Australian Workplaces, found that Australia had the sixth highest prevalence rate of workplace bullying when compared to 34 European countries, finding that women were more likely to be bullied and experience unwanted sexual advances and unfair treatment because of their gender than men, with a national prevalence rate of 9.6 per cent of workers (nearly one in 10), with 12.9 per cent of workers having been bullied for between seven and 12 months.
If, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australia has 14,547,800 workers, then, based on these notional prevalence rates, approximately 2,909,560 workers have experienced sexual harassment, and approximately 1,876,666 workers have been bullied in at least the past 12 months.
Despite this, in the 2024–2025 reporting year, the Australian Human Rights Commission only received 626 complaints for breaches of the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth) (see page 18), and, in a previous reporting year (2023–2024), the Fair Work Commission only received 883 applications for an order to stop bullying, and nine applications for an order to stop sexual harassment (see page 65).
The vast majority of harmful behaviour goes unreported, not because it isn’t happening, but because our systems are not designed to prevent it. Australian researchers have concluded that most victims of discrimination and harassment do not complain, and even if they do, complaints often settle with non-disclosure agreements restricting them from disclosing the circumstances of their complaints.
The Australian Human Rights Commission itself has noted that fewer than one in five people have made a formal report or complaint about sexual harassment at work, and those who do complain experience negative consequences, including ostracism, victimisation, being ignored by colleagues, resigning, or being labelled a troublemaker.
Why anti-discrimination frameworks don’t yield the intended outcomes
Anti-discrimination laws, while essential, cannot prevent harm at scale, because they are unable to deliver the robust preventative intent outlined in the Change the Story Framework, which emphasises proactive, systemic measures to address the underlying drivers of violence against women at a societal level, including through the use of work health and safety laws.
The International Labour Organization has considered that in the past, sexual harassment and other forms of gender-based violence and harassment have been addressed through complaints-based regimes. The issue with the complaints system is that while it prohibits the behaviour in question, it then places the responsibility to report and prove the wrongdoing on the shoulders of the person who experienced the harmful behaviour.
The International Labour Organization concludes that anti-discrimination regimes have not made satisfactory inroads into eradicating sexual harassment and other forms of gender-based violence and harassment at work.
Notably, the Australian Human Rights Commission currently has only four active inquiries started in the 2024–2025 financial year, supporting 35 employers to help them understand and meet their obligations, impacting approximately 7,500 workers, despite Australia having approximately 1 million employing businesses, and approximately 3 million workers experiencing sexual harassment each year.
Conversely, safety regulators, such as WorkSafe Victoria, in Victoria alone, in the 2023–2024 reporting year, conducted 50,177 workplace visits, with 13,943 improvement notices issued.
The national lack of intersectional diversity in leadership roles is a safety risk
It is now well established that harassment, discrimination and bullying are not interpersonal problems; they are structural problems.
Those most exposed to harm are women, culturally and racially diverse workers, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers, LGBTIQA+ workers, workers with disability and migrant workers. These workers are overrepresented in insecure work, underrepresented in leadership, and face unequal access to social and economic power.
Safe Work Australia has already recognised that gender inequality and other forms of disadvantage, such as power imbalances based on age, sex, gender, sexuality, migration status, race and disability, combine (intersect) to increase exposure to hazards and vulnerability to harm. Despite this, our safety laws do not currently regulate workplace power structures, or structural discrimination, which fuel harm.
Data tells a consistent story:
Workplace inequality is driving behavioural harm at scale:
The path forward
Prevention isn’t about more posters, more training, or another Respect@Work or Bullying Policy. It’s about redistributing workplace power. That means intersectional, equitable representation in leadership roles.
Because of this, and building on her earlier work leading to recommendation 7(f) of the Unlocking the Prevention Potential Report, in a personal capacity, Sapphire Parsons led, coordinated and authored a National Joint Submission with a coalition of more than 25 peak bodies and experts, including Casey Guilmartin, Dr Rachel Cox, and Elena Campbell, calling for the recognition and regulation of work-related gendered violence as a safety hazard.
The signatories to the Joint Submission call for a national framework to prevent work-related gendered violence, recognition of discrimination as a workplace safety hazard, positive duties to address inequitable leadership structures, and a shift from complaints-based mechanisms to primary prevention of work-related gendered violence by addressing workplace imbalances in power.
The Joint Submission was launched on 28 October 2025 and has received:
The International Labour Organization’s Convention C190 – Violence and Harassment Convention, 2019 (No. 190) calls for member states to acknowledge that “gender-based violence and harassment disproportionately affect women and girls … recognising that an inclusive, integrated and gender-responsive approach, which tackles underlying causes and risk factors, including gender stereotypes, multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination, and unequal gender-based power relations, is essential to ending violence and harassment in the world of work”.
In providing a Global Best Practice Note for the Joint Submission, and in the context of this article, Dr Rachel Cox noted that “C-190 calls for an integrated approach to prevention of gender-based violence and harassment. France requires that organisations conduct risk assessments considering different exposures based on sex. In Québec, Canada, WHS regulation mandates consideration of the specific realities of women and men in risk identification and analysis. In terms of risk management, the ‘who’ and the ‘how’ are as important as the ‘what’.”
In providing a foreword for the Joint Submission, Elena Campbell, a member of the federal government’s Expert Panel for the Rapid Review of Prevention Approaches, notes that “other jurisdictions have moved towards the integration of controls for work-related gendered violence into work health and safety regulations. It is now time for Australia to follow suit – to respond to a growing consensus and a once-in-a-generation chance to recognise our international obligations and to balance ongoing developments in the discrimination sphere with associated workplace safety reform.”
Renee Bianchi, president of Australian Women Lawyers, has said: “Australian Women Lawyers is proud to support the Joint Submission to Safe Work Australia. Framing work-related gendered violence as a workplace safety hazard and putting in place positive measures to address it in that context is a vital step in addressing this endemic problem.”
To this extent, the recommendations the Joint Submission proposes for Australian safety regulations are consistent with global best practice and Australia’s international obligations. They are also consistent with the primary prevention approach underpinning Australia’s national strategy to end gender-based violence.
If adopted, the proposed recommendations would be the most significant national reform for women’s workplace safety since Australia’s Sex Discrimination Act (1984), and the single biggest national push for the safety of women and gender diverse people in Australia’s history, under a safety regulatory framework.
Sapphire Parsons is a senior workplace lawyer with Macpherson Kelley. This article reflects her personal views and not that of the firm.
Casey Guilmartin, Elena Campbell, and Rachel Cox also contributed to the article.
