Denmark to record online harassment of public servants in major project
A new research project in Denmark will set out to give a clearer picture of the extent of online harassment aimed at public servants and other people in public-facing roles.
The project will aim to illuminate the extent of online harassment of people in public facing jobs and public servant roles, ranging from apartment managers to municipal administrators, broadcaster DR reports.
In additional to harassment on social media, threatening calls and text messages are among the forms of abuse people in such positions can face because of the type of work they do, according the researchers behind the project.
“This is largely unstudied in a Danish context. Neither how the risk of digital harassment can be reduced nor how best to respond to it,” Lars Peter Sønderbo Andersen, senior researcher at the regional Gødstrup Hospital in Herning, told DR.
Danish media including DR have previously reported an increasing trend of harassment, threats and inappropriate behaviour towards municipal staff, including on social media.
The abuse is not limited to municipal employees, however, with building administrators, vets and case managers at public agencies among others cited as having been targeted.
As such, private and public workplaces, including small and large business are all among the over 100 organisations to take part in the study.
The overall aim of the three-year project will be to deliver guidelines for preventing and responding to online harassment.
That will be an important resource according to Heidi Schrøder, a job centre consultant in the town of Kolding, herself a target of past online harassment related to her work.
“It made me doubt whether I was good enough. I also felt I needed to check I still had a private number and address,” she told DR.
With research-based guidelines her superiors at work “would have known what to do”, she said, noting that it took a long time for her workplace to react to the issue.
“If it’s violence or threats then an entire apparatus goes to work. If the same resources were described for online harassment, it would probably have been dealt with differently,” she said.
The research project is a joint venture between trade unions, the national body for municipalities Local Government Denmark and the workplace standards body Arbejdstilsynet. Its funding comes from the Working Environment Research Fund, part of the Ministry of Employment.
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The project will aim to illuminate the extent of online harassment of people in public facing jobs and public servant roles, ranging from apartment managers to municipal administrators, broadcaster DR reports.
In additional to harassment on social media, threatening calls and text messages are among the forms of abuse people in such positions can face because of the type of work they do, according the researchers behind the project.
“This is largely unstudied in a Danish context. Neither how the risk of digital harassment can be reduced nor how best to respond to it,” Lars Peter Sønderbo Andersen, senior researcher at the regional Gødstrup Hospital in Herning, told DR.
Danish media including DR have previously reported an increasing trend of harassment, threats and inappropriate behaviour towards municipal staff, including on social media.
The abuse is not limited to municipal employees, however, with building administrators, vets and case managers at public agencies among others cited as having been targeted.
As such, private and public workplaces, including small and large business are all among the over 100 organisations to take part in the study.
The overall aim of the three-year project will be to deliver guidelines for preventing and responding to online harassment.
That will be an important resource according to Heidi Schrøder, a job centre consultant in the town of Kolding, herself a target of past online harassment related to her work.
“It made me doubt whether I was good enough. I also felt I needed to check I still had a private number and address,” she told DR.
With research-based guidelines her superiors at work “would have known what to do”, she said, noting that it took a long time for her workplace to react to the issue.
“If it’s violence or threats then an entire apparatus goes to work. If the same resources were described for online harassment, it would probably have been dealt with differently,” she said.
The research project is a joint venture between trade unions, the national body for municipalities Local Government Denmark and the workplace standards body Arbejdstilsynet. Its funding comes from the Working Environment Research Fund, part of the Ministry of Employment.
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