The operative word is violence : when systems enable violence: a critical systems analysis of Luxembourg's response to psychological workplace violence
Kirk, Devon (2026)
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-202604035625
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-202604035625
Tiivistelmä
This thesis examined why Luxembourg's institutional and legal responses to psychological workplace violence fail the people they claim to protect. Using critical advocacy research, document analysis, and systems mapping grounded in Meadows' principles and Hobfoll's Conservation of Resources theory, harm originating in workplaces was traced through healthcare systems, family systems, and children, producing costs externalized by organizations onto targets, families, and public systems.
Analysis of Luxembourg's 2023 anti-mobbing legislation revealed a non-performative framework creating the appearance of protection without substantively providing it. The law imposes probatio diabolica on targets while a "justified by the needs of the company" defense permits conduct Luxembourg recognizes as psychological violence outside the workplace. A discrimination-laundering mechanism was identified whereby conduct targeting protected characteristics can be recategorized as mobbing, stripping targets of burden-shifting protections discrimination law would otherwise provide.
The systems maps make visible what siloed institutional approaches obscure: intervention thresholds that become failure points, resource depletion cycles compounding across individual, family, and public systems, and the mounting costs of delayed response. These dynamics extend into educational settings where depleted teachers have reduced capacity to respond to students' needs while children of targets arrive already carrying the downstream consequences of workplace violence. Psychological workplace violence constitutes a public health issue that cannot be addressed by abdicating oversight to the organizations that perpetuate it. Luxembourg's narrow framing renders cascading harm invisible by design, placing the state in violation of its obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and its own constitutional mandate. Externalized costs across healthcare, unemployment (when accessible), family services, and child development are absorbed by the state while organizations generating those costs bear none of them. Recommendations address legal reform, pattern-based investigation, prevention infrastructure, and equity-centered trauma-informed approaches, particularly in institutions serving vulnerable populations with a focus on educational settings.
Analysis of Luxembourg's 2023 anti-mobbing legislation revealed a non-performative framework creating the appearance of protection without substantively providing it. The law imposes probatio diabolica on targets while a "justified by the needs of the company" defense permits conduct Luxembourg recognizes as psychological violence outside the workplace. A discrimination-laundering mechanism was identified whereby conduct targeting protected characteristics can be recategorized as mobbing, stripping targets of burden-shifting protections discrimination law would otherwise provide.
The systems maps make visible what siloed institutional approaches obscure: intervention thresholds that become failure points, resource depletion cycles compounding across individual, family, and public systems, and the mounting costs of delayed response. These dynamics extend into educational settings where depleted teachers have reduced capacity to respond to students' needs while children of targets arrive already carrying the downstream consequences of workplace violence. Psychological workplace violence constitutes a public health issue that cannot be addressed by abdicating oversight to the organizations that perpetuate it. Luxembourg's narrow framing renders cascading harm invisible by design, placing the state in violation of its obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and its own constitutional mandate. Externalized costs across healthcare, unemployment (when accessible), family services, and child development are absorbed by the state while organizations generating those costs bear none of them. Recommendations address legal reform, pattern-based investigation, prevention infrastructure, and equity-centered trauma-informed approaches, particularly in institutions serving vulnerable populations with a focus on educational settings.