When Anti-Violence Work Hurts Its Workers

Staff had been assaulted by a client’s abuser. When a frontline worker asked for additional paid time off so those employees could seek support, the response called their fitness for the job into question: “they’re just not cut out for this work.”

That is one worker’s recollection, recorded in Frontline Workers on the Back Burner, a 2026 report published by the Vancouver Aboriginal Friendship Centre Society with Simon Fraser University researchers. The employer is unnamed. The recollection puts a pointed question to organizations whose purpose is to help people facing violence: what happens when the people needing help are on the payroll?

An employer cannot prevent every danger its workers encounter. Its response to an injury is a decision of its own. In this account, the employees’ need for recovery became grounds for questioning their suitability for the job. The employer’s handling of that need deserves at least as much attention.

That is the difficulty running through the report’s accounts of frontline work in Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley. Organizations established to help people facing violence also employ people who describe being expected to absorb harm. Funding pressures help explain the conditions in which they work. They do not answer everything workers say about how they are treated.

Burnout as an operating assumption

Another participant recalled raising turnover with a chief executive. Burnout and turnover, the worker said the CEO told them, were “baked into the model of the organization.” The worker understood that improving the situation was not a priority.

Once burnout becomes an operating assumption, staff departures cease to look like a problem requiring an answer. The next vacancy can be filled without asking what the last worker was carrying, or what could have kept them in the job. That is the danger in the CEO’s reported explanation: an organizational decision disappears inside an occupational hazard.

The researchers also heard about harm inflicted within workplaces. One participant described how a person could find the work rewarding and still be humiliated by coworkers in front of colleagues and clients. Other accounts concerned bullying and racism. The source of the strain, in those accounts, included the people working alongside them.

An appeal for more resources leaves these accounts unresolved. A complaint about humiliation requires an employer to examine what happened, including whether someone with power over the complainant was involved. The organization has to look inside its own workplace, including at the people entrusted with running it.

The report draws on data from 66 workers across 17 focus groups, alongside 21 key informant interviews. Those anonymized regional accounts cannot tell us how often harm occurs across the Downtown Eastside. They also include employers responding differently.

Some participants valued managers who helped establish boundaries around workloads and schedules. Workers also described being included in decision-making and receiving clear explanations when funding constraints necessitated unwelcome changes. Those employers still faced constraints. Their staff described decisions about how to manage within them.

An employer’s budget can limit what it provides. The way a manager responds to a worker asking for help remains something that manager must explain.

The money still matters

It would be convenient to make this entirely a failure of management. The Downtown Eastside’s WISH Drop-In Centre Society offers a reason to resist that conclusion.

In its accounts for the year ended March 31, 2025, provincial grant revenue rose from approximately $4.774 million to $5.155 million, an increase of about eight per cent. Contributions fell from approximately $1.011 million to $484,600, a decline of about 52 per cent. More provincial grant revenue was received in the accounts, alongside a substantial loss of income elsewhere.

A grant increase, therefore, is a poor shortcut to a verdict on what WISH could afford. These organization-wide figures do not identify a particular program’s staffing budget. Restricted contributions have designated purposes, and revenue recognized in the accounts differs from available cash. The financial question has to be asked at the level of the work being funded.

WISH is not identified as an employer behind the report’s anonymous accounts. Its records are relevant because they show why a judgment about management needs an accurate account of the resources available to it. Treating every operational problem as proof of mismanagement would evade that work.

WISH’s own September 2026 strategic-plan announcement also acknowledges processes that pulled in different directions, alongside stretched capacity. It says the organization needs to align operations and support “more humane ways of working.” The statement recognizes room for organizational change within a difficult funding environment.

A shortage of resources can restrict a manager’s choices. It does not establish that every choice made was unavoidable.

What the funding has to cover

The province has questions to answer about those choices, too. In a July 16, 2026 statement, parliamentary secretary for gender equity Jennifer Blatherwick said BC invests more than $60 million annually in 475 victim-services and violence-against-women programs. She also acknowledged the need for sustained investment.

The total spending cannot tell a worker whether help will be available during a dangerous shift. The BC Society of Transition Houses’ 2024 one-day census found that 53 per cent of responding shelters operated with one staff member for between 10 and 24 hours. That puts a specific staffing arrangement behind the argument about resources.

Lone staffing is not automatically unlawful. WorkSafeBC’s working-alone requirements call for attention to hazards and arrangements to check the worker’s well-being and obtain assistance. A service’s operating budget must be examined against the requirements of those arrangements. Its employer remains responsible for making them work safely.

Under section 21 of the Workers Compensation Act, employers must protect workers’ health and safety and remedy hazardous conditions. Those duties do not wait for another funding announcement.

A provider that says it cannot meet the requirements needs to identify what is missing and how it affects the work. A funder defending its contribution needs to explain the capacity it expects that contribution to purchase. A headline amount cannot resolve a disagreement about the staffing required for a safe shift.

The report’s companion action plan proposes quarterly workload checks and reporting actual against optimal workloads to funders. That would put the gap between a funded service and the labour needed to run it on the record. The employer’s response to that gap should be recorded alongside it.

The employer is part of the inquiry

Covering an injured employee’s absence costs money. That belongs in the funding discussion. The suggestion that injured staff should reconsider their occupation belongs in an examination of the employer’s response. Treating the entire exchange as evidence of underfunding would leave that response unchallenged.

The same applies when workers describe humiliation by colleagues. More money can create options for an organization. It cannot supply an account of who did what or how a complaint was handled.

For bullying and harassment, WorkSafeBC already requires employers to establish investigation and follow-up procedures, including corrective actions and a time frame. Employers must make sure those procedures are followed. A commitment to preventing violence in the community does not settle whether an organization has met that responsibility towards its employees.

The action plan makes that responsibility uncomfortable in a very specific way. Recommendation 18 calls for reviewing workplace codes of conduct with frontline workers at the centre of the process. It explicitly includes management as a potential source of workplace harm. The people who would ordinarily receive the complaint may also be the people it concerns.