Harassing phone calls, threats, even physical attacks — domestic abuse doesn’t stop at home.

When victims leave, their batterers know where they can find them — at work.

“It happens all the time,” said Sally Puleo, women’s program director at Women’s Transitional Care Services, which serves Lawrence and Ottawa. “It usually is just one component of a larger picture.”

Advocates for victims of domestic violence and several lawmakers are pushing for legislation that would make it clear that women who are forced to quit their jobs because of abuse would be able to collect unemployment insurance benefits.

“It is serious when domestic violence comes to the workplace,” said Sandy Barnett, executive director of the Kansas Coalition Against Sexual and Domestic Violence.

In Kansas during 2001, there were nearly 19,870 incidents of reported domestic violence with 17,208 injuries and 11,406 arrests, according to a report by the Attorney General’s Office. WTCS, which serves Douglas, Franklin and southern Jefferson counties, reported 509 incidents and 224 arrests,

“Job loss and the threat of job loss prevent many battered women from escaping violent relationships by removing their ability to sustain themselves and their children,” said Rebecca Smith of the National Law Employment Project in Olympia, Wash.

Smith said often when victims of domestic violence are at work, they are harassed on the telephone or they may need to miss days of work because of injuries or attempts to seek court protection.

“In the worst cases, the perpetrator may attack a victim at work,” she said.

¢Women’s Transitional Care Services¢Douglas County Rape Victim Survivor Services

When domestic violence spills into the workplace, it also puts the victim’s co-workers at risk, Barnett said. When a batterer takes the abuse into a public setting, the risk of violence may increase for everyone involved.

Eighteen states in the past six years have adopted legislation that specifically covers domestic violence as “good cause” to leave work, Smith said.

Kansas law allows unemployment benefits for people who must leave their jobs because of a compelling emergency, and that has been used at times to cover some victims of domestic violence. But the proposed legislation would establish unequivocally that domestic violence victims are entitled to benefits. A clarification of the law also would ensure that more women know about its existence, supporters said.

The cost of this law at this point is unknown, according to the Kansas Department of Human Resources. During an 18-month period in Connecticut, 47 cases of domestic violence cases were administered for unemployment benefits at a cost of about $170,000, Smith said.

The domestic abuse proposal is included in a larger bill to increase unemployment benefits, which lawmakers give little chance of passing. But lawmakers said the provision on domestic violence may be placed in its own bill to increase its chances of approval.