Occupational Violence And Aggression: The Four Types And What Stops Each One

What Occupational Violence and Aggression Means in an Australian Workplace

Australian regulators use a single, deliberately wide definition. Occupational violence and aggression covers any incident in which a person is abused, threatened or assaulted in circumstances relating to their work.

Three parts of that definition do more work than people expect.

Abused sits alongside assaulted. A worker who is screamed at across a service counter has experienced occupational violence, in the same category as one who is struck. Nothing has to be broken for the duty to engage.

Threatened means the harm does not have to land. A raised fist, a description of what someone will do to a worker after their shift, or a message sent to a worker’s personal phone all qualify.

Relating to their work is broader than on your premises. It reaches home visits, client sites, deliveries, vehicles, transport between jobs, and online channels the work runs through. If the work put the person in the situation, occupational violence and aggression law reaches it.

The behaviour itself ranges wider than most policies acknowledge. In health, aged care, disability and education settings some of it is described as acting out, challenging behaviour or behaviours of concern.

Those descriptions are useful clinically. They do not change the fact that the worker on the receiving end faces a health and safety risk, and the risk has to be controlled either way.

What Counts as Occupational Violence and Aggression

• Biting, spitting, scratching, hitting and kicking
• Pushing, shoving, tripping and grabbing
• Throwing objects at or near a worker
• Verbal threats and verbal abuse
• Threatening someone with an object or a weapon
• Armed robbery
• Sexual harassment and sexual assault
• Online harassment, threats or abuse connected to the work
• Assault with a weapon

Employees are not the only people covered. Contractors, labour hire workers, volunteers, students on placement and work experience participants are all exposed, and all sit inside the duty.

This article is about the shape of the problem: where occupational violence comes from, and which control actually works against each source.

If you need the assessment process rather than the taxonomy, the occupational violence and aggression risk assessment checklist sets out the nine-point method and the hierarchy of controls in order.

Why Occupational Violence Is Now Mostly a Psychological Injury

Most workplace violence programmes are built as physical security programmes. Locks, cameras, duress alarms, guards, safe rooms.

Those matter, and later in this article there are settings where they are the only thing that works.

But they are aimed at the less common injury.

Safe Work Australia’s national analysis of occupational violence and aggression found that psychological injuries have overtaken physical injuries as the most common serious workers’ compensation claim type arising from workplace violence.

The same analysis found serious claims for assault and exposure to workplace violence rose 56% over five years.

Sit those two findings next to each other and the implication is uncomfortable.

The volume is rising, and the harm is increasingly landing somewhere that a camera cannot see and a lock cannot prevent.

A worker who is verbally abused at a counter forty times a year is accumulating a psychological injury that no physical control addresses, and each individual incident will look too small to report.

There is a gendered pattern in the data as well. Over ten years, claims for physical violence rose 73% among women against 33% among men.

That gap tracks the industries where client-facing and care work concentrates.

The Four Types of Occupational Violence, Sorted by Where the Aggression Comes From

Australian regulators sort work-related violence by where it comes from, because the source determines what an employer can do about it.

SafeWork NSW draws the primary line between external violence, which is “usually associated with robbery or other crimes and the perpetrator is someone from outside the workplace”, and service-related violence, which “arises when providing services to clients, customers, patients or prisoners”.

Two further sources sit alongside those in Australian guidance: aggression between workers, and family violence that reaches a worker at work.

WorkSafe Victoria is explicit that employers “should control the risk of family violence in the workplace in a similar way to controlling the risk of other forms of workplace violence”.

That gives four types of occupational violence, and they behave completely differently.

Read down the right-hand column. There is almost no overlap.

A duress alarm does not stop a manager shouting at a graduate.

A respectful workplace policy does not stop an armed robbery.

A single occupational violence policy that says the organisation has zero tolerance and offers de-escalation training has, in practice, addressed one of four sources.

External Occupational Violence From People With No Legitimate Business With You

This is the version most people picture, and it is the least common.

Someone with no relationship to the organisation commits a crime and a worker is caught in it: armed robbery, a break-in during a shift, aggression in a car park after close, an intruder in a building.

It is also the one type where physical and environmental controls do most of the work, because there is no relationship to manage and no service to redesign.

• Remove what the person came for: Cashless payment, time-delay safes, low cash holdings and visible signage about them. Elimination sits at the top of the hierarchy of controls for a reason
• Control the boundary: Swipe access, visitor identification, reception sightlines, locked back-of-house areas, and lighting on approaches and car parks
• Remove the isolation: Most external occupational violence happens to someone working alone, at night, or opening and closing. Two-person opening and closing, staggered finishes, escorts to vehicles, duress devices for lone and mobile workers
• Rehearse the response: The instruction in an armed robbery is compliance, not resistance. Workers need to have been told that, in advance, by name

The critical point is what happens afterwards.

Serious external occupational violence incidents are the ones most likely to be notifiable to the regulator, most likely to involve police, and most likely to produce a psychological injury in someone who was not physically touched.

Everyone present is affected, including the worker who was in the back room.

Client and Customer Occupational Violence, the Largest Source by a Distance

Safe Work Australia’s analysis is unambiguous: clients and customers are the most common source of work-related violence, and physical violence is more likely to come from a client, patient or customer than from a co-worker.

The most frequently reported behaviours are angry or hostile conduct, shouting and swearing, and intimidation and insults.

The scale in customer-facing work is now well documented.

The Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association surveyed nearly 3,000 retail and fast food workers in 2025, and the results describe a category of occupational violence that has become routine.

Client-initiated occupational violence resists physical controls, because you have invited the person in.

The controls that work are about how the service is designed and how much the worker is left to absorb alone.

• Remove the flashpoint where you can: A large share of aggression is triggered by waiting, by a refused request, or by a decision the worker has no authority over. Queue design, honest wait information, self-service for the transactions that generate the most conflict, and giving frontline staff the authority to resolve small things all reduce incidents before de-escalation is needed
• Pass the information forward: In health, aged care and disability work, a known history of aggression should reach the next worker through handover and the care plan. In service work, a flagged account should reach the next person on the counter. Occupational violence repeats against organisations that make each worker discover the risk personally
• Staff for the risk, not the average: Second-person presence at known flashpoints and times, and never rostering a lone worker into a known escalation
• Be prepared to withdraw service: This is the control organisations avoid, and it is the one with teeth. Trespass notices, banned accounts, service delivered by phone instead of in person, or a decision that a particular client is seen only in pairs

Where verbal abuse from customers is the dominant form, our guide on how to deal with verbal abuse in the workplace covers what a worker should do in the moment and afterwards.

Worker to Worker Occupational Violence and Aggression

Aggression between colleagues is the source organisations are least comfortable naming as occupational violence, because it arrives with an existing internal process attached.

It gets routed to HR as a conduct issue, or to the bullying policy, and the health and safety framing gets lost.

It should not be. A threat from a supervisor and a threat from a customer create the same risk to the same worker.

Worker to worker occupational violence covers intimidation, threats of harm, physical contact, blocking someone’s exit from a room, throwing or striking objects, and aggression that is explained afterwards as a strong personality or a robust management style.

Where the conduct is repeated and unreasonable it also engages the bullying provisions of the Fair Work Act.

Where it targets a protected attribute it engages anti-discrimination law as well.

Those routes run in parallel with the health and safety duty, they do not replace it.

The controls are different again, and they are almost entirely about supervisors.

• Conduct standards that name aggression specifically, rather than only naming bullying and harassment
• Supervisors who are trained to intervene at the first incident, because the pattern that ends in a serious incident almost always has an unaddressed first step
• A complaint route that does not require the worker to raise it with the person causing the problem
• Consequences that are visible enough that the workforce believes the standard is real

For the detail on identifying and responding to physical intimidation and contact between colleagues, see physical harassment in the workplace.

Family Violence as a Source of Occupational Violence at Work

This is the source most occupational violence policies do not mention at all, and it is the one where an employer’s obligations have changed most in recent years.

WorkSafe Victoria’s position is direct: family violence becomes a workplace issue when its effect on an individual extends beyond the home and into the workplace, and employers should control that risk in a similar way to other forms of workplace violence.

What it looks like in practice:

• A current or former partner waiting at reception, in the car park, or at a known finishing time
• Repeated calls to the switchboard, or to colleagues, to locate or pressure the worker
• Using the organisation’s public information, or a colleague’s goodwill, to find out a roster or a work location
• Abuse directed at colleagues who will not put a call through
• Distraction and fatigue that create a physical safety risk for the worker and everyone around them, particularly in driving, machinery and clinical work

The controls sit in the same families as external violence, with one addition that is unique to this source.

• Access and screening: Visitor identification, controlled entry, reception briefed on a specific name, call screening, and removing the worker’s contact details and photograph from public-facing material
• Practical changes to the worker’s exposure: Changing a direct line or work email, altering start and finish times, changing a car park bay, escorting to the vehicle, or relocating a desk away from a public entrance
• A named contact person so the worker discloses once, to someone trained, rather than to whoever is nearest
• Leave: All employees, including casuals, are entitled to 10 days of paid family and domestic violence leave each year under the Fair Work Act. It has applied to employers with 15 or more employees since 1 February 2023 and to small business employers since 1 August 2023. The entitlement renews annually and does not accumulate

Confidentiality is the part organisations get wrong.

Information about a worker’s circumstances should reach only the people who need it to make a control work, and a worker who discloses should be told in advance who will be told and why.

Where Occupational Violence Risk Actually Sits, by Industry

All four types of occupational violence exist in every sector, but they are not spread evenly, and the pattern follows contact with distressed, impaired or aggrieved members of the public rather than anything about the work itself.

The context that keeps these figures honest is that around 41% of Australians have experienced at least one incident of violence since the age of 15, and work-related incidents account for at least 13% of violent events.

Occupational violence is a meaningful slice of the total violence Australians encounter, and it is the slice an employer can do something about.

If you are outside these sectors, the risk factors travel rather than the industry label. Handling cash, drugs or valuables.

Working alone or in isolated locations. Working at night or outside business hours. Delivering services to distressed or angry people.

Making decisions that people experience as a refusal. Any of those puts occupational violence on your risk register.

The Repeat Aggressor Problem Most Occupational Violence Policies Miss

Return to a single number from the retail survey. Of workers who were abused, 59% were abused repeatedly by the same customer.

That reframes the problem. Occupational violence in customer-facing work is not a diffuse hazard produced by the general public.

A large share of it is produced by a small group of people who come back, and who are frequently known to the staff by sight before anything is reported formally.

There is evidence about what happens when organisations act on that.

After Woolworths obtained workplace protection orders against 13 repeat offenders in Canberra, offences at those stores fell 23%.

Thirteen individuals, and a fifth of the problem.

Most occupational violence policies are not built to find those people.

They record incidents against the worker who was involved rather than against the person who caused them, which means the pattern only ever exists in the memory of the staff on that shift.

Three incidents involving three different workers and one customer read as three isolated events in the system, and as an obvious problem to everyone on the floor.

Two changes fix it, and neither is expensive:

• Record the aggressor, not only the incident: Where the person is identifiable, an account, a client file, a vehicle, a description, the record needs to support the question “has this person done this before, to anyone”.
• Set a threshold that triggers action automatically: Decide in advance what number of incidents moves a person to a banned account, a trespass notice, phone-only service, or two-person attendance. Without a threshold the decision falls to whichever supervisor is on, and it is almost never made.

Controls That Work, Matched to Each Type of Occupational Violence

The hierarchy of controls applies to occupational violence exactly as it applies to a physical hazard, and our risk assessment checklist sets out that hierarchy in order with the test for whether you have applied it properly.

What follows is the part the hierarchy alone does not tell you: which control belongs to which source.

Start with what SafeWork NSW says about training.

De-escalation and communication training is worthwhile, and it is “insufficient on their own”.

An organisation whose entire occupational violence response is an annual training module has placed its only control at the bottom of the hierarchy.

What a complete set looks like:

• Eliminate: Cashless sites. Removing the transaction that produces the conflict. Delivering a service remotely where in-person attendance is the risk
• Design out: Counter height and depth, controlled entry, sightlines, lighting, safe rooms and second exits, duress alarms that reach someone who will respond, and vehicle and car park design
• Change the work: Two-person attendance at known risk, no lone work at flashpoints, roster relief so the same worker does not absorb the same aggressor, information handover about known aggression, and clear authority to end an interaction
• Set the standard and enforce it: Signage stating that abuse of staff is not accepted, backed by service withdrawal that actually happens. Signage without enforcement teaches workers the standard is decorative
• Train: Recognising escalation, de-escalation, when to disengage, how to report, and what happens after a report. This is a real control, it is just not the first one

Leadership behaviour determines whether any of this survives contact with a busy week.

Our companion article on how leadership and culture reduce work-related violence risk covers the six responsibilities that sit with managers, and why a positive safety culture is itself a control rather than a nice-to-have.

Your Legal Duty to Manage Occupational Violence and Aggression

Occupational violence is a work health and safety matter first, and everything else second.

Under the model Work Health and Safety Act, a person conducting a business or undertaking owes a primary duty to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety of workers while they are at work.

Health in that duty means physical and psychological health. Both parts of it are engaged by occupational violence and aggression, and the psychological part is engaged by conduct that never becomes physical.

The duty is not limited to your employees. It extends to contractors, labour hire workers, volunteers and students on placement, and to other people whose health and safety could be put at risk by the work, which includes customers and visitors present during an incident.

Several other obligations run alongside it:

• The psychosocial hazard duty: Violence and aggression is a named psychosocial hazard. Every jurisdiction now requires psychosocial risks to be identified and controlled the same way physical risks are, with Victoria’s Occupational Health and Safety (Psychological Health) Regulations in force since 1 December 2025
• Consultation: Workers and health and safety representatives must be consulted on hazards affecting them. In occupational violence this is not a formality. Frontline workers know which customers, sites and times are the problem, and that knowledge is usually not in the system
• Incident notification: Serious incidents are notifiable to the regulator, immediately, and the site must be preserved. Occupational violence incidents are missed here more often than plant or fall incidents, because they are treated as security or HR matters
• Sexual harassment obligations: Where the aggression is sexual, the positive duty under the Sex Discrimination Act and the Fair Work Act prohibition apply in addition to the health and safety duty, including where the source is a customer or client
• Anti-discrimination law: Where abuse targets race, sex, religion, disability or another protected attribute, as it did for 31% of the retail workers surveyed, discrimination law applies alongside

Assault is also a criminal offence in every state and territory. Police involvement and the health and safety duty are not alternatives.

An organisation that reports an assault to police has not thereby discharged its duty to control the risk of it happening again.

After an Occupational Violence Incident, What Has to Happen

The full post-incident sequence, including notification, site preservation and what your evidence has to look like afterwards, is set out in the risk assessment checklist.

Three points belong specifically to the argument in this article, and they are the ones organisations get wrong.

1. Do not send the affected worker back to the counter to finish the shift: This is the most common failure after client-initiated occupational violence, and it teaches everyone watching exactly what reporting is worth
2. Have the supervisor make contact the same day: Where the harm is psychological, response speed is a better predictor of outcome than the severity of the incident itself
3. Record it against the aggressor as well as the worker, so that the repeat pattern in the section above becomes visible in the system rather than only in people’s memories

Under-reporting is the constraint on all of it.

Occupational violence goes unreported precisely because each individual incident feels too small to write up, which is how a serious psychological injury accumulates invisibly and why the reporting threshold matters more here than for physical hazards.

Training and Culture That Prevent Occupational Violence

Training is the last control in the hierarchy, and it is still necessary. What it has to achieve is narrower and more useful than most programmes attempt.

• Workers can name what occupational violence and aggression is, including that verbal abuse and threats count
• Workers can recognise escalation early and know they are permitted to disengage
• Workers know exactly how to report, and that a small incident is worth reporting
• Supervisors know their response in the first hour matters more than anything they do later
• Everyone understands that the organisation will act on a repeat aggressor, because that belief is what makes the first report happen

Sentrient’s occupational violence and aggression awareness course takes about 15 minutes and covers what occupational violence is, its impacts, identifying hazards and risks, responding to violence and aggression, and contributing to a safe physical and psychological environment.

It was developed with Mills Oakley in Australia, and it is built for employees, contractors and volunteers rather than for managers alone.

Where the aggression is between colleagues or sexual in nature, workplace bullying and sexual harassment training carry the specific obligations.

Around the training, the cultural work is what the old advice on this page got right and is worth restating plainly.

Set the standard from the top and be seen to hold it. Promote physical and psychological safety together rather than treating the second as softer.

Write policies and procedures that say what will happen rather than only what is unacceptable.

Support people who call out poor behaviour instead of managing them as a complication. Report every incident and act on what the reports show.

Recognise the people who keep others safe, because that is what tells the workforce which behaviour the organisation actually values.

A workplace violence policy template gives you the document.

A workplace compliance system gives you the part a regulator asks for, which is evidence that the training was completed, the policy was acknowledged, the incidents were recorded and the controls were reviewed.

Frequently Asked Questions About Occupational Violence and Aggression

1. What Is Occupational Violence and Aggression?

It is any incident in which a person is abused, threatened or assaulted in circumstances relating to their work. It covers physical assault, threats, verbal abuse, spitting, sexual harassment, armed robbery and work-related online abuse, and it applies wherever the work takes the person, not only on your premises.

2. Is Verbal Abuse Counted as Occupational Violence?

Yes. The Australian definition begins with abused, before threatened or assaulted. Verbal abuse from a customer, client or colleague is occupational violence and aggression, it is a named psychosocial hazard, and repeated exposure to it is a leading cause of psychological injury claims.

3. What Are the Main Types of Occupational Violence?

Australian guidance sorts it by source. External violence comes from someone with no legitimate business with the organisation, usually connected to robbery or another crime. Service-related violence comes from clients, customers, patients or people in custody. Worker to worker aggression comes from colleagues or managers. Family violence follows a worker into the workplace. Each needs a different control.

4. Which Source of Occupational Violence Is Most Common?

Clients and customers. Safe Work Australia’s analysis found they are the most common source of work-related violence, and that physical violence is more likely to come from a client, patient or customer than from a co-worker.

5. Is Occupational Violence Increasing in Australia?

The claims data says yes. Serious workers’ compensation claims for assault and exposure to workplace violence rose 56% over five years, and claims for physical violence rose 73% among women over a decade against 33% among men. In retail and fast food, the share of workers reporting physical violence tripled between 2021 and 2025.

6. What Is an Employer’s Legal Duty for Occupational Violence and Aggression?

Under work health and safety law a PCBU must ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the physical and psychological health and safety of workers. Violence and aggression is a named psychosocial hazard, so it must be identified, assessed and controlled using the hierarchy of controls, with workers consulted. Serious incidents are notifiable to the regulator.

7. Does an Employer Have Duties When Family Violence Reaches the Workplace?

Yes. WorkSafe Victoria’s guidance is that employers should control the risk of family violence at work in a similar way to other forms of workplace violence, using access control, call screening, changes to the worker’s exposure and a named contact person. Separately, all employees including casuals are entitled to 10 days of paid family and domestic violence leave a year under the Fair Work Act.

8. Is Training Enough to Prevent Occupational Violence?

No. Training sits at the bottom of the hierarchy of controls because it depends on a person performing correctly under pressure, and SafeWork NSW describes training measures as insufficient on their own. It is necessary, but it works only alongside elimination, design and administrative controls such as staffing, information handover and withdrawing service from repeat aggressors.

Read More About Occupational Violence And Aggression:

• The occupational violence and aggression risk assessment checklist
• How leadership and culture reduce the risk of work-related violence
• How to deal with verbal abuse in the workplace
• How to identify, prevent and respond to physical harassment in the workplace
• The common types of harassment at work