Women are being terrorised on the job daily by men they have had relationships with, according to the head of the Physical Abuse Centre.

And Police and the courts are failing to cooperate on the number-one means the women have of protecting themselves -- restraining orders, Mrs. Arleen Swan said yesterday.

"There are so many cases we have bordering on what happened to Rochelle,'' Mrs. Swan said.

Thirty-year-old receptionist Mrs. Rochelle West was stabbed to death on the job on Thursday allegedly by her estranged husband. For legal reasons Mrs.

Swan declined to comment on whether the victim had a restraining order against him.

But she said the slaying in public in broad daylight had forced the issue into the open.

The centre knew of at least a dozen cases right now where women were getting menacing phone calls on the job from estranged partners, she said. As a result the women were going to work fearing for their safety.

"They say things like `I'll get you and don't think you're ever going to get away from me -- I'm watching you','' Mrs. Swan said. "There have been numerous cases where we've had to alert the employers and make special precautions for an employee's safety.'' Women in white-collar jobs were often the first to seek help because the harassment was affecting their job performance, she noted.

These workplace threats in many cases were on top of abuse the women were getting in their homes, she noted.

"I had a woman call me last night to say her niece had been near death in her own home,'' Mrs. Swan said.

"Rochelle was not the only one. We have so many. I can pick up every case I have and say that the person has been near life and death.'' She added the centre received more than 300 calls a year from battered women.

Mrs. Swan pointed to ineffectiveness of court restraining orders as the main reason for women having to live and work in fear for their lives.

"The problem is restraining orders,'' she said. "We are not getting the cooperation from the Police and the courts. Many times they do not apprehend the man at all and they are running around loose.'' She hoped the recent tragedy would force the community to take a closer look at the safety of women on the job.

Meanwhile, Police said domestic violence spilling over into the workplace as in the West case was "definitely unusual'' in Bermuda. "It's more outside the workplace and in private residences and in social surroundings,'' Community Relations officer Insp. Roseanda Jones said.

Mr. Vaughn Mosher of the private employee assistance programme firm, Benedict Associates, agreed.

"We've not had it in this community,'' he said. "The last one known was eight-ten years involving a murder in the (Library) Archives.'' However, there had been a significant rise in violence in the workplace in the United States, a trend Bermuda was not yet seeing.

Counsellor Ms Laurie Peniston, who said she deals with more cases of domestic violence than sexual harassment, noted the US Centers for Disease Control had estimated that there were 10 million work-related deaths a year including seven thousand trauma related deaths, which could be either murders or accidental deaths.

She said often domestic violence overflowed into the workplace affecting the victim's job performance and ability to function.

By Marina Esplin-Jones