This post is about a question I asked Australian library workers in a national survey about public libraries working with people experiencing homelessness. The question I asked was: “Have you ever felt unsafe at work because of the behaviour of a library user you think may be experiencing homelessness?”

This is what the results looked like for that question:

Of the 383 people who answered the question, 175 answered that they had felt unsafe at work, while 208 said they had not had this experience. I decided to have a look at where the people who said they have had the experience of feeling unsafe are working. This what I found:

This table is saying that 55.4% of library workers in capital cities have felt unsafe at work because of the behaviour of someone they think may be experiencing homelessness. People working in libraries in non-capital cities, regional cities, regional towns and small towns have all had similar experiences to each other with around 38% of these library workers reporting feeling unsafe at some time. The library workers who have reported fewer experiences of feeling unsafe are in our rural or remote towns with only 1 such person (16%) experiencing feeling unsafe. Taken together, 45.7% of library workers who responded to this question have felt unsafe at work.

Then I started wondering how the States and Territories compare. This is the answer:

What this is saying is that respondents from NSW are less likely to have had experiences with people they think may be experiencing homelessness that have made them feel unsafe than respondents from any other state or territory. For all the other states and territories except South Australia, the results are pretty similar. The South Australian responses indicate that library workers in South Australia are more likely to have these experiences than any other state or territory – by a significant amount with 68.9% or respondents in SA having felt unsafe at work.

This is something that I will be investigating further as I talk to library staff in more depth about their experiences of working with people they think may be experiencing homelessness. I want to know what behaviours made them feel unsafe and in what situations these experiences occurred. Perhaps we need to look at how we train library staff to work with challenging behaviours? NSW is doing something interesting with their training of library staff and perhaps the results from this question are indicating that their training is having a positive effect. But even in NSW, 30.8% of respondents are having experiences that make them feel unsafe. It is not OK for library workers anywhere to feel unsafe at work. This is something I will be keeping in mind as I continue my research.