Addressing the silence: Utilising salon workers to respond to family violence

Abstract

Community programs designed to train salon workers to address the issue of family violence are becoming increasingly commonplace. This article draws on interviews with trainees of one such program called HaiR-3Rs, run by the Eastern Domestic Violence Service (EDVOS) and launched in January 2018 in Victoria, Australia. HaiR-3Rs trains salon workers in recognising, responding to, and referring clients experiencing family violence. Using data collected from qualitative interviews this article reflects on trainee experiences of the HaiR-3Rs program. This article offers insights into whether training salon workers to respond to the issue of family violence places an additional burden of expectation on workers, as well as practical issues and limits of the training. The results of this study suggest that programs like HaiR-3Rs tap into deeper issues about the emotional nature of salon work, and has implications for the hair and beauty industry more broadly.

Family violence services around the world are increasingly recognising that hair and beauty salon workers are uniquely placed to connect clients to their services (McLaren et al., 2010). Family, domestic and sexual violence ¹ impacts at least one in six women in Australia (AIHW, 2019), and there have been increasing attempts to broaden an understanding of members of the community who are in a position to assist with prevention and intervention work (McCann and Myers, 2019). In May 2017, the Victoria State Government in Australia launched Free from Violence: Victoria’s Strategy to Prevent Family Violence and All Forms of Violence against Women. First Action Plan 2018–2021, which outlined its “strategy to prevent family violence and all forms of violence against women” (DHHS, 2018). This strategy detailed government responses to the 2016 Royal Commission into Family Violence in Victoria, with an emphasis on prevention (DHHS, 2018: 1). Within this context, in January 2018 the Eastern Domestic Violence Service (EDVOS) in Melbourne launched its ‘HaiR-3Rs (Recognise, Respond and Refer)’ program (EDVOS, 2020). The program aims to educate salon professionals – including both hairdressers and beauty salon workers – to strengthen broader community responses to the crisis beyond services dedicated specifically to family violence.

For those who have never worked in a salon the idea of training salon workers to respond to family violence disclosures may raise concerns. Does this mean expecting salon workers to act as counsellors or social workers, and is this ethical? Does training place an additional and unreasonable burden on this workforce? These were the kind of questions that this pilot project aimed to address directly with the salon workers who had completed the HaiR-3Rs training. This article draws on interviews with trainees and trainers who completed the HaiR-3Rs training conducted as a pilot study into investigating the benefits and possible limitations of training salon workers to respond to the issue of family violence. This article considers salon workers’ experiences of the training as reflected in the interviews and whether expecting workers to undertake this training places questionable additional expectations on the workforce.

While similar programs have emerged across the globe in recent decades (as discussed later), these have largely been premised on the anecdotal understanding that the salon worker–client relationship is often one of trust and intimacy, and that salon workers are therefore an untapped community resource for helping people experiencing family violence. These programs have focused on addressing the issue of family violence, but less attention has been paid to the reception of the training by workers and whether it places an additional set of expectations on them. The findings of this study address this query directly and help contribute to knowledge around programs that train salon workers to respond to family violence. This article also offers some reflection on the difficult emotional terrain that salon workers must navigate that goes beyond the issue of family violence.

Training salon workers to address family violence

The broad aim of programs like HaiR-3Rs is to capitalise on the unique intimate relationship that salon workers have with clients, toward creating a society free from family violence. Many of the programs run in an Australian context, including HaiR-3Rs, have drawn on the evidence and experience of the ongoing ‘Cut It Out’ campaign run by Salons Against Abuse (Professional Beauty Association, 2018). Originating in Birmingham, Alabama, the project became a state-wide initiative, before being turned national by the National Cosmetology Association in 2003. In parts of the US, such initiatives have also been formalised as legal requirements for salon workers. For example, since 2017 Illinois law has required salon workers complete a course covering information on sexual assault and domestic violence every two years. It is the first such legislation in the US, and completion of the course is necessary to renew individual cosmetology licences (King, 2017).

Several programs similar to ‘Cut It Out’, but smaller in scale, have emerged across Australia and New Zealand. For example, the New Zealand-based ‘It’s Not OK’ campaign ran as a partnership between Ohakune hairdresser Kelly Porter and the Taupo Violence Intervention Network (VIN), which encouraged hairdressers to direct clients to where and how they could seek help for client issues (Kirkeby, 2008). The ‘Cut It Out’ campaign was also launched in Lismore in New South Wales in 2008 by the Lismore and District Women’s Health Centre to teach hairdressers how to identify and respond to the indicators of domestic violence in their clients (Williams, 2008). Similarly, a program funded by a grant from The Body Shop of $10,000, ran in Victoria in 2009. This was a partnership between two rural health services and a regional women’s health service (McLaren et al., 2010). The focus of this program was enhancing communication related to mental health and family violence issues between hairdressers and their clients. The project found an increase in confidence and knowledge on the part of the hairdressers related to appropriately responding to and referring clients who disclosed these issues. Findings also suggested that salon workers are in an important position to be able to refer clients on, given that trust is a key element of the salon–client relationship built up over repeat salon visits (McLaren et al., 2010). Most recently, in August 2020, the New South Wales Government helped to launch a ‘Cut It Out’ program in the Illawarra influenced by the program of the same name in the USA (Crabb, 2020), and in 2021 the ‘Hairdressers with Hearts’ program was also launched in Queensland, which trains hairdressers to respond to both domestic and elder abuse (HWH, 2021).

Like many of the other programs, EDVOS’ HaiR-3Rs was explicitly influenced by and adapted from the long-running ‘Cut It Out’ training conducted in the US (Professional Beauty Association, 2018). Many of EDVOS’ print materials are drawn directly from the connections they developed with this program, with materials reconfigured for an Australian context. EDVOS is a specialist family violence service located in Melbourne’s Eastern Metropolitan Region (EMR), a not-for-profit largely funded by the State Government of Victoria. EDVOS outlines its vision as ‘A community free from family violence, where everyone feels safe’ (EDVOS, 2020). According to EDVOS, the HaiR-3Rs program has three key aims: to educate salon workers about the relationship between gender inequality and family violence; to address the issue of gender stereotyping with workers; and to provide resources and information for workers who may need to refer clients to family violence services (EDVOS, 2020). At its core, HaiR-3Rs involves training salon workers to understand the issue of family violence and therefore recognise and respond to issues that may arise within the salon setting, but also has a focus on prevention through education on negative and harmful gender inequalities and stereotypes which are key drivers of family violence (Our Watch et al., 2015).

The program sets out to equip salon workers with the skills and materials needed to feel confident in ‘knowing what to say [and] knowing what to do’ around the issue of family violence (EDVOS, 2020). It involves a free three-hour session, generally conducted within a salon setting, though occasionally in an educational setting (such as a TAFE – Training and Further Education – building). The training covers the relation between gender inequality and family violence, how experiences of family violence can affect individuals, and how salon workers can respond to clients who disclose or display warning signs of family violence. At the conclusion of each training session participants are provided with brochures and posters from EDVOS which they can display in their salon space or give to clients.

In 2018, training sessions were held by EDVOS in salons across the EMR and other metropolitan regions of Melbourne, as well as with salon students at Box Hill TAFE and Victoria University. Training was initially rolled out only in the EMR, a process which required EDVOS staff to cold call over 700 salons across Melbourne to garner interest. Contact was also made via email, online messenger services, and promotion via media and various social media platforms. As media interest in the program grew, salons from the north of Melbourne began to contact EDVOS to request training sessions closer to their salons. This required negotiation of expansion of the funding arrangement beyond the EMR, and liaison with other family violence services beyond the EMR. Training salon workers – who might otherwise seem like unlikely targets for family violence prevention and response work – suggests recognition of the Victorian government goal of enabling a more ‘holistic’ approach to the crisis (Victoria State Government, 2017: 31). Recognising the role that salon workers might play in the lives of some of their clients, programs like HaiR-3Rs broaden understanding of what it means to prepare a future workforce to manage family violence. Programs like HaiR-3Rs recognise the frequent and close contact that salon workers have with a diverse range of members of the community and the intimate nature of the work.

The intimacy of salon work

Salon work has long been identified as a profession that is well placed to provide informal support to members of the community (Anderson et al., 2010, Cowan, 1982). Research continues to demonstrate that salon workers occupy a unique role with clients (Hill and Bradley, 2010), and it is in the intimate space of the salon that strong client–worker relations involving trust can develop over repeat visits (Eayrs, 1993; Garzaniti et al., 2011). Given the intimate aspects of salon work, it is unsurprising that research shows clients who have experienced family violence are likely to divulge their experiences to salon workers (Beebe et al., 2018; Divietro et al., 2016). Less attention has been given to considering whether the unique role of the salon worker ought to be utilised for public health or other outreach, especially in relation to training programs like HaiR-3Rs.

There is a growing body of literature that considers the importance of intimacy in service work in the post-Fordist era (Hochschild, 2012 [1983]; McRobbie, 2011; Medler-Liraz, 2016; Weeks, 2007). Research on salons specifically suggests that emotional labour is a key part of hair and beauty salon work (Cohen, 2010; Garzaniti et al., 2011; Gimlin, 2002; Hamilton et al., 2020; Hill and Bradley, 2010; Kang, 2010; Parkinson, 1991; Sharma and Black, 2001; Sheane, 2012; Straughan, 2012; Toerien and Kitzinger, 2007a, 2007b; Yoo et al., 2014). As Mears (2014: 1331) suggests, the value of ‘soft skills’ in workforces like that of the hair and beauty industry is part of the post-Fordist shift from manufacturing to intensified service work. These studies on the emotional dynamics of salons largely draw on Hochschild’s (2012 [1983]) germinal writing on emotional labour. Hochschild famously investigated the management of feelings demonstrated by airline workers, wherein this management was conducted for financial gain (as ‘labour’). The scholarship on emotional labour in salons demonstrates that salon work comprises both touch and talk, and involves not only aesthetic management/transformation of clients but also the management of client feelings and emotions (Toerien and Kitzinger, 2007a). Though this body of literature often notes workers participate in ‘informal therapy’ with their clients (Barber, 2008), the focus has largely been on describing the labour dynamics in salons rather than connecting these insights up to specific programs like HaiR-3Rs that actively utilise the nature of the relationship between workers and clients in salons.

Much of the work more explicitly focused on harnessing the relationship between workers and clients in salons has been conducted in the realm of public health. This work considers how the relationship between client and worker might be an important source of connection to services. For example, hairdressers have been described as an ‘untapped resource’ for dermatological interventions given that these workers are uniquely placed to detect head and neck melanomas on their clients (Roosta et al., 2012: 687). Hairdressers have also been described as possible ‘lay health educators’ for reproductive health (Rasmusson et al., 2018: 519), and beauty salon workers described as ‘natural helper[s] in the delivery of health messages’ (Solomon et al., 2004: 805). Reasons given to explain the ideal position of salon workers to act as helpers includes that salons are ubiquitous, are visited frequently by clients, often involve lengthy sessions, and are spaces where talk about things like health happens (Linnan and Ferguson, 2007). Research has also been conducted around the health interventions that barbers and salon workers might be able to provide for older clients (Makabe et al., 2020; Paulson, 2008; Ward et al., 2016). For example, Ward et al. (2016: 405) looked at the role of hairdressers in the lives of clients with dementia in the UK, and found that workers and clients formed a kind of ‘embodied alliance’ according to the rhythms of salon life that was empowering for the clients. They argue that ‘salons remain a place of mutual care and support, where the telling of stories continues to draw people into “shared universes of meaning”, becoming a site of collective agency’ (Ward et al., 2016: 409).

This body of research highlights how salon workers are uniquely placed to forge connections with at-risk communities that may not be easily reachable otherwise. Importantly, as Dawson (2014) argues in her study of African American salon workers in the USA, the salon relationship can play a crucial role in recovering from harmful life experiences like family violence. As she writes:

the salon environment was essential in preserving the sense of worth typically absent among victims of violence. This space provided the women a place to enter and begin the healing process beyond their brokenness. It offered resistance to systems of oppression that demoralized and dehumanized African American women. (Dawson, 2014: 209)

As Dawson highlights, the nature of the salon dynamic and salon space itself means that workers act not simply as conduits of information, but that more broadly the salon can provide a safe and curative space for addressing these issues within communities.

A study conducted in Australia in 2013 found that younger hairdressers particularly felt mentally overwhelmed at work (Southern Primary Health – Noarlunga, 2013). Based on results of a questionnaire sent to workers they found that workers often reported feelings of stress related to client interactions dealing with personal issues or health problems. Analysis of the worker responses to the questionnaire revealed that feelings of stress were the result of newer hairdressers not being adequately prepared through their studies for the ‘incidental counsellor’ role salon workers are often expected to perform (Southern Primary Health – Noarlunga, 2013: 7). Aside from this report, the general lack of attention to the experiences of workers in relation to programs that set out to utilise the intimacy of the salon worker role to other ends suggest that more salon worker voices are needed in this space.

Methods

Research methods for the purpose of this article involved observing one extended HaiR-3Rs training session to understand the training in action, and conducting qualitative one-on-one semi-structured interviews with trainers and trainees. The promotional materials for the program were also analysed in order to better understand the stated aims of the program: a section of the EDVOS website dedicated to HaiR-3Rs which included an explanatory video, and physical printed brochures and posters. A total of 11 one-hour semi-structured interviews were conducted, eight of which were with salon workers who had completed the HaiR-3Rs training. Two trainers who were involved in delivering the training were interviewed, as well as one community services student who had attended the training but was not a salon professional. These interviews offered an opportunity for greater insight into the program beyond what was observed. Interviews with the two trainers involved in running the program allowed for better contextualisation and understanding of the aims of the training, and any difficulties encountered over the many sessions they had conducted. The additional interview conducted with the community services student allowed insight into the training from the perspective of an outsider trainee who does not work in a salon. As illustrated below, the interviews with the salon workers offered the opportunity to gather in-depth narratives of their experiences, to provide some insight into individual experiences of attending and running the training to help guide and improve future iterations of the program.

Interview participants were recruited via an email sent from EDVOS, to all salon workers who had completed the training. Each interview was no longer than one hour in length, and interviewees had the option to stop the interview at any time prior to the conclusion of the hour (though none requested this option). Prior to the interviews, participants filled out a short demographic questionnaire. The interviews were semi-structured. Questions focused on: the training itself (‘Tell me about your experience of the training?’); the implementation of the training within the salon post-training (‘Is there anything that you still feel unsure about after the training?’); and ideas for improving the training (‘Do you think the training could be changed in any way to better meet your needs in the salon?’). At the end workers were also asked to provide a general reflection on the emotional nature of salon work based on their experience in salons. The semi-structured approach allowed for gathering answers to the same questions/topics across all interviews, while still providing the interviewees room to discuss issues which arose in the course of discussion. Interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. Notes were taken during interviews, and during the observed training session (the latter was not recorded). The interview transcripts were analysed thematically using NVivo. Participants, including the trainers of the program, have been allocated pseudonyms for the purpose of the research to maintain anonymity.

Results and discussion

Interviewees were between 18 and 54 years of age. Of the salon workers this included four men and four women, with between 1 and 36 years of salon experience. One salon worker identified as Cypriot Australian, seven identified as Caucasian Australian, one identified as English. Seven of the salon worker interviewees had technical training in hairdressing, and one beauty worker had a diploma in beauty. The salon workers included five salon directors, one beauty salon owner, one general salon worker and one hair salon assistant. The community service worker who was interviewed identified as a Caucasian Australian woman. Demographic information about the HaiR-3Rs trainers interviewed as part of the study has been excluded here to help maintain anonymity given the relatively small size of the organisation involved.

The interviews offered an opportunity to speak with some of the program trainees in more detail about their experiences of the training, why and how they had found it informative, how it might be improved, and whether they now felt any sense of overburdened responsibility back in their salon environments. Results and discussion of the interviews are discussed in detail in the following subsections which describe the three main themes identified in analysis of the transcripts: training alleviating existing burdens for workers; training unearthing deeper issues about the nature of salon work; and practical issues and limits of what the training can achieve.

Training alleviating existing burdens

The interviews explicitly involved asking trainees whether they felt burdened by the training. Across the interviews all of the salon workers stated that they did not feel like the training posed an additional burden; rather, they found it very helpful for helping them to navigate disclosures and conversations that they were already having in the salon space.

As Adrienne reflected, hairdressers ‘are already taking on the burden’ of client disclosures, without necessarily knowing the best ways to respond. She suggested: ‘No, I don’t feel burdened. I feel great. I feel less burdened. I feel like every hairdresser takes this burden on. If you are not up for that, you are not doing hair.’ Similarly, James, a hairdresser, talked about the training helping him feel his burdens were in fact ‘alleviated’. Like Adrienne, he felt that emotional management of clients was simply part of the job: ‘I guess for me working in this industry has always felt like you’re a bit of a counsellor anyway because people feel very comfortable and so they open up to you more.’ As Leticia, a beauty therapist, also noted, when she had clients who were going through very difficult personal times, she would often stay in touch with them outside of salon hours to check if they were okay. These reflections echo existing literature that suggest salon workers frequently liken ‘themselves to counsellors, psychiatrists, nurses or psychotherapists with respect to the way they addressed clients’ subjective needs’ (Sharma and Black, 2001: 922), and that they see informal helping as ‘a normal, indeed sometimes very important aspect of their job’ (Cowan, 1982: 390).

Most crucially the interviews suggested that the EDVOS training helped to clarify what the boundaries of the worker/client relationship ought to be, providing appropriate responses and referral pathways rather than maintaining the idea that workers need to take responsibility for client issues. Many of the salon workers also noted that the training was in fact the first time that anyone had formally recognised the kind of makeshift therapeutic work that they already do and was thus part of breaking the silence around this emotional aspect of work in the industry. Helen, a hairdresser, also importantly noted a general sense of not feeling supported enough within the industry more broadly to know who to go to around client disclosures, and that the EDVOS training was the first time she had ever been made aware of family violence service contacts.

All salon worker interviewees reported that they had never received prior formal training about the emotional aspects of salon work. Furthermore, no one in the interviews discussed formal debriefing mechanisms within their salons. Though some salons may have these processes in place, from all reports this appears to be the exception rather than a norm in the industry. As hairdresser Luke expressed, ‘I guess it would be nice to have – in an ideal world it would be nice to have – I guess like a therapist would have – what are they called? Like someone that I can debrief with at the end.’ The workers interviewed revealed that the lack of supervision and debriefing mechanisms in their salons often meant that client disclosures over time led to worker ‘burnout’. Furthermore, several workers described the ‘party culture’ that exists within salon work, which emerges as a way for workers to let off steam in the absence of other supports. For example, Adrienne noted, ‘You do a lot of drinking and drug taking with other hairdressers and whingeing. It’s a real party profession. So, all that debriefing definitely does happen but just to your co-workers like after work and stuff.’ To this end, it is important to recognise that programs like HaiR-3Rs may play a small role in filling a gap in the industry that may require much longer and deeper investment in order to ensure that workers are appropriately equipped to manage the emotional demands of the job, to actually help workers mitigate ‘burnout’.

Training unearthing deeper issues

While a key aim of HaiR-3Rs was to raise awareness of family violence issues with salon workers, the interviews demonstrated that the training also tapped into an array of other issues that arise in the course of salon work.

In the interviews workers reflected somewhat humorously on just how much clients divulged to them. As Adrienne, a hair salon worker, remarked, ‘you immediately tell your hairdresser too much, there is no six-month dating period. It’s like date number one, here’s all my darkest secrets and then you progress from there.’ Yet there was also a very serious element to what was sometimes disclosed by clients – which, according to the workers interviewed, included everything from daily stresses, to intimate partner abuse, terminal illness, gender identity issues, mental health concerns, and even suicidal ideation. Though addressing social issues beyond family violence is beyond the responsibility of EDVOS, the interviews indicate that the salon space is not only opportune for public health and other services to connect to, but in fact that more supports and connections need to be provided to salon workers to help them manage their daily work.

The interviews revealed that it is not only because the salon is a space for talk that disclosures occur, but there is something essential about the physicality of the salon encounter that makes clients more likely to disclose sensitive information. Hair and beauty workers come into contact with different parts of clients’ bodies depending on the services offered – including intimate areas such as heads, faces, hands, inner thighs. As Adrienne outlined, these are sensitive parts of the body that are rarely touched by anyone outside of intimate partners yet is a form of touching that is ‘completely appropriate’ in the space of the salon. As Tim, a hairdresser, noted, ‘generally people talk more when they’re at the basin’. Workers acknowledged that it was the physical intimacy of the salon setting, and particular acts like hair washing, that facilitated more chat from clients, and along those lines often more emotional intimacy and sharing of personal information.

While workers reported enjoying the pseudo-therapeutic role that they could play for clients, acting as a vent for life’s difficulties, they also identified that there was a severe lack of support within the hair and beauty industry broadly for managing more serious disclosures. For some, like hairdresser Luke, the EDVOS training made him more aware of the silence that exists within the industry around these issues:

In the past I haven’t felt that great because when you’re having conversations like that I guess it makes you think about humanity in itself and I guess it highlights areas where we’re all about creating an image for someone or making them feel better externally but internally I think a lot of people are really wanting to talk to people and be able to get a lot of the stuff that’s happening to people, whether it be family violence or some form of abuse or just whatever it is, just unhappiness and I guess to be a sounding board is fantastic and to me that feels really quite special when people are able to do that. It’s just where does it go from there?

Similarly, when James, also a hairdresser, was asked about how he dealt with client disclosures of serious issues he suggested, ‘the first thing you, kind of, have to do is try and take a step back from it and process the information quickly. I mean, you still, I suppose, are expected to respond.’ In other words, not responding to client disclosures was not expected/allowed in the salon space. James talked about how client vulnerability needed to be dealt with sensitively, and not simply with silence. As Luke outlined, the EDVOS training had finally given him some resources and tools to respond to disclosures about family violence in a way that could really help clients, rather than leave him as a worker feeling helpless about the stories he was encountering.

Practical issues and limits of the training

Though the interviews revealed the ways that the EDVOS training helped provide some sense of alleviated burdens for trainees and tapped into deeper issues in the salon environment, the interviews also highlighted practical issues around how to encourage workers to attend the training in the first place, as well as identifying limits of what the training can actually achieve.

The interviews indicate that there may be a self-selection bias issue in terms of who signs up to training. In an interview with one of the trainers, they suggested that an ideal outcome of the training is both an impact on the salon worker but also a whole-of-salon approach:

The ideal outcomes? I guess I’ll start with the salon professionals. They feel super confident and cared for, I guess, and safe. . .. And also, I guess, ideally, you kind of want their workplaces also to feel . . . you wouldn’t just want it to be one worker in a salon. You kind of need the salon to be a supportive environment for that to happen, so they’re kind of debriefing with each other as well or like obviously a . . . team approach.

While EDVOS offered training to all workers or salons willing to sign up, not all salon staff would necessarily attend. Several interviewees noted that other people in their salons were simply not interested in the training. The aforementioned trainer also noted the difficulty of getting people to attend sessions, ‘We were finding that even people who were kind of passionate about it or whatever – you’d have so much flake out on the day. Or the hairdressers were busy.’ Given that salon workers often work long shifts, are talking with clients all day and often on their feet, it is perhaps unsurprising that people were reluctant to attend unpaid training in their own time after work. This again suggests that this kind of training may need to be implemented more systematically during early professional training in order to capture a wider array of salon workers, and to embed these skills and knowledge within the workforce as a whole and achieve the ideal team approach noted by the trainer.

To this end, the interviews revealed that the existence of other programs – within Australia and overseas – had some influence on workers signing up to the HaiR-3Rs training. As Leticia reflected:

I’d heard about it happening overseas so in one of the waxing Facebook groups that I’m in, people had mentioned doing a very similar kind of course over there [overseas] and it’s just from what I can gather it sounds like it’s become a really standard thing to do over there in the industry.

In this way the existence of programs appears to have a snowball effect: the more of these programs that appear, the more likely it is that workers will sign up to them given the view that this is something others are doing in the industry. The interviews suggest that this kind of training might be appealing to many salon businesses not only for altruistic community-minded reasons, but also as a way to keep up with trends in the industry and specifically to position the business as community-minded. This opens up space for community services to work with salons in a way that benefits both the service and the salon, though the risk here may be making sure that salons also do the hard work within their salon culture to implement the training rather than simply utilise the training as a visible source of ethical capital.

Along these lines the serious limitation of the training identified in the interviews is that it cannot be seen as a cure-all to the issue of family violence: you can’t ‘train away’ the issue within the community. For example, Felicity, a hairdresser, expressed enthusiasm for the training, but in the interview also argued that ‘a lot of men are affected by family violence’ and that EDVOS should have done more to address this. As one of the trainers noted to us, when they first started running the training, the question of male victims was one of the points that many trainees became stuck on:

I said, okay, we’re going to talk about the elephant in the room, and I have a slide about why we’re talking about women and about lethality, and that made such a difference, because it wasn’t just men who would raise that, other people would go, yeah, but what about the men, they experience it too . . . and if you didn’t have that slide there you’d spend quite a bit of time trying to unpack that so that they understood it, whereas having that slide right upfront – and I’ve got it upfront in all my sessions now . . . are the stats. Two women die nearly every 10 days, that kind of stuff. It’s like, we understand that men experience family violence. At EDVOS we work with men experiencing elder abuse, and we work with young men as well, and children, male children, and, but the majority of the work we do is with women, and it’s because of the lethality.

The EDVOS training explicitly addressed the gender question, using research data to emphasise the point. Yet even after training salon workers may hold false – or damaging – views about family violence, because these views are embedded within the broader community and are difficult to undo. These views cannot always be successfully challenged in one training session. The interviews suggest that it is crucial to recognise that a limit of training programs like HaiR-3Rs is that they are only one piece of the puzzle of addressing family violence within the community. Without adequate funding for services that can act to pick up referrals from salon workers, this kind of training is redundant, if not dangerous. In other words, where there are funding announcements for programs like HaiR-3Rs these need to go hand in hand with funding announcements for the client-facing work of family violence services. If we acknowledge that the issue of family violence cannot be ‘trained away’, we must also recognise that dealing with the issue of family violence in salons does not end at the salon worker, but rather that community services and salons can work together to strengthen referral pathways to help keep communities safe(r).

Although the interviews highlighted how the training and referral pathways provided by the EDVOS training can help address some of the issues that salon workers encounter in their regular course of work, the HaiR-3Rs training is (understandably) limited to a focus on family violence. Reflections from the salon workers interviewed indicate that broader change may be needed within the hair and beauty industry. In other words, these reflections suggest that the HaiR-3Rs program is not a panacea for addressing the emotional aspects of salon work.

Conclusion

The interviews with salon workers who had completed the HaiR-3Rs training suggest that beyond simply training workers about family violence, a space was created for workers to think about the nature of their work in salons and to address the silence around the emotional aspects of salon work. Scholarship on beauty workers specifically suggests an ever-increasing physical and emotional workload amid a corresponding reduction in financial and job security (Boris and Parreñas, 2010). As the interviews revealed, programs like HaiR-3Rs can help facilitate a feeling of alleviated burdens by illuminating referral and support pathways. However, it is well-noted in this research is that although HaiR-3Rs – and programs like it – provide some recognition of the emotional nature of salon work, they are limited in terms of addressing the issue of family violence.

Though salon workers receive all kinds of intimate disclosures regarding topics of varying severity, programs like HaiR-3Rs are squarely focused on a single issue. This is not to say that HaiR-3Rs training and similar programs ought to address these broader issues – which would clearly be beyond the remit of family violence services. However, the training scratches the surface of the nature of the emotional nature of salon work – soft skills for which workers usually receive little preparation before entering the industry. This suggests that training like HaiR-3Rs simultaneously opens a space for workers to have this aspect of their work recognised and reveals the need for broader education about the support services available for other issues regarding client distress.

A limitation of this study is the relatively small size of the interviewee sample, given that the intention of this study was to act as a pilot study for further investigation rather than providing a much larger representative sample of trainees of the HaiR-3Rs program or of salon workers more broadly. However, the themes identified in this group of interviews suggest that there are many productive paths for future work to investigate, including the disclosures that salon workers are encountering on a regular basis that go beyond the issue of family violence and how workers might best be supported to connect to community services around different issues. Though the number of participants in this study was small, the stories that they told and the voices raised here ought not be overlooked given the serious issues they discuss, including burnout in the hair and beauty industry. While the aim of programs like HaiR-3Rs is, understandably, to tackle to issue of family violence, the stories reflected in this sample suggest that the training inadvertently taps into something deeper and broader about the nature of salon work that warrants further attention.

In addition to family violence services looking to train salon workers, the results of this pilot study should be of interest to the hair and beauty industry in terms of indicating possible gaps in providing support to workers. The findings from this study suggest that there may be significant opportunities to connect salon workers with a much broader array of community services – from mental health providers to LGBTIQ switchboards. As the interviews analysed in this pilot study suggest, making such connections may have significant benefits for the community and salon workers alike. The unique role that salon workers play in the lives of their clients should not be overlooked or under-utilised. Bolstering connections between community services and salon workers would not only offer unique prevention and intervention pathways to address a range of social issues, it would also equip salon workers to better refer on their clients, rather than ‘taking on’ client issues as their burden to bear.