Client Violence against Social Workers in Israel: Measurement Issues, Frequency and Severity

Background and purpose: Client aggression against social workers has been documented as a major problem worldwide. The current study represents the preliminary results of the first survey of client aggression against social workers in Israel. The paper presents the revised version of the CVQ (Client Violence Questionnaire). The original version was presented in the SSWR2009 conference. The original scale was composed of verbal, threat, property and physical violence subscales. The current version added a subscale regarding the use media-based intimidation and harassment (such as the use of internet, emails, and phone-calls), and examined empirically the scale on a representative sample of social workers in general municipal agencies in Israel.

Methods: the study was designed as a cross-sectional-survey. It encompassed 305 social workers in 16 general municipal welfare agencies throughout Israel. The survey was designed purposefully to represent the layout of general municipal welfare agencies throughout the country, and included cities, small towns, and rural agencies. It encompassed both Jewish and Arab municipalities as well as mixed ones. The majority of respondents were women (87.4%), with average age 42 (sd=8.9). The instruments of the survey included a revised and extended form of the CVQ - a measure of client aggression towards social workers. The measure included questions related to verbal violence, threats, property damage, physical violence, and use of technological media for harassment. Descriptive statistics and confirmatory factor analysis were carried out using SPSS-17.

Results: Cronbach's alpha indicated a high level of internal reliability among the scale items (alpha=0.92). However, unlike the expected theoretical structure of the scale, factor analysis indicated that the existence of 3 subscales: verbal aggression and threats, property damage, and physical violence and use of media for harassment and intimidation. Of the 305 respondents, 85.9% have been verbally abused at least once over the last three months, 25.2% have been exposed to properly damage by clients, and 31.8% were exposed to physical violence and media harassment. On the average, every worker has been verbally abused 5.6 times over the last year, been subject to property damage once over the last year, and had a 25% probability of being subject to physical violence and/or harassment and intimidation using phone-calls or internet-based media.

Conclusions and implications: The issue of aggression against social workers has been sporadically studied over the years throughout the world. Yet, there is a dearth of knowledge regarding this issue, its causes, and outcomes. Whereas comparable forms of aggression, such as partner violence, or youth violence, are being extensively studied, the issue of aggression and violence against service providers in general and social workers in particular, is relatively unchartered territory. The present paper is a small step towards further knowledge and understanding of the phenomenon, its extent worldwide, and its implications for social work practice, as it obviously affects the workers' work-life and work-quality. It is about time this issue would become one of the major emerging horizons for a profession that is giving so much to its clients and so little to itself.