The Unison (NI) women’s committee has worked energetically to raise awareness across the public sector employers in Northern Ireland of violence against women and children. They have sought to bring change about by ensuring the employer accepts that it is good practice for their organisation to have policies and partnerships in place to ensure support is available to all employees finding themselves in this situation. To enable them to carry out this work the women’s committee made a decision in 2003 that as part of their work programme they would actively campaign to ensure all public sectors employers where UNISON have a membership that they put in place a work-place policy to address the issue of domestic violence. When this work started there were no workplace polices in place in Health Trusts or Education Boards in N Ireland. The committee agreed to take this work forward by holding seminars to raise awareness of domestic violence geographically.