Gender-based violence and harassment (GBVH) sits at the intersection of human rights, equality, and occupational safety and health (OSH) laws. Statistical data highlights the high prevalence of workplace violence (WPV) in healthcare, with women, nurses, and those working at emergency departments at a higher risk. Despite international frameworks on this matter, gaps remain in translating standards into national laws and workplace practices, particularly in high-risk sectors such as healthcare. A comprehensive legal and epidemiological search was conducted. Legal sources were identified using the CMS Law-Now platform, with corresponding primary legislation retrieved from official national legal portals and analysed in full. In parallel, epidemiological evidence was collected through a structured search of grey literature, surveillance data, and peer-reviewed studies, drawing on international institutional platforms (World Health Organization, International Labour Organization, European Agency for Safety and Health at Work – EU-OSHA) and PubMed/MEDLINE. Following the analysis, the resulting report was shared with national governmental labour representatives. This paper provides an overview of international, European-level, and national-specific frameworks addressing GBVH, through a legal literature review and a comparative analysis of those national frameworks of the selected European countries: Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, and Sweden. The comparative overview found that while all analysed countries prohibit harassment, their regulatory focuses differ. Ongoing regulatory gaps, particularly regarding technology-facilitated and intersectional forms of GBVH, limit effective implementation and cross-country comparability. Persistent challenges identified include resource constraints in enforcement and insufficient coverage of digital and remote work risks.
Santos et al. (Fri,) studied this question.