A general definition has yet to be agreed in the international arena. At an Expert Meeting organized by the European Commission in Dublin in May 1995, the following definition was proposed: incidents where persons are abused, threatened or assaulted in circumstances related to their work, involving an explicit or implicit challenge to their safety, well-being and health. In this definition, abuse is used to indicate all behaviours which depart from reasonable conduct and involve the misuse of physical or psychological strength; assault generally includes any attempt at physical injury or attack on a person including actual physical harm, and threats encompass the menace of death, or the announcement of an intention to harm a person or damage his/her property. The ILO code of practice Workplace violence in services sectors and measures to combat this phenomenon, adopted in 2003 (published in 2004), defines workplace violence as [A]ny action, incident or behavior that departs from reasonable conduct in which a person is assaulted, threatened, harmed, injured in the course of, or as a direct result of, his/her work. It goes on to distinguish between internal workplace violence, which takes place between workers, including managers and supervisors, and external workplace violence, which takes place between workers (and managers and supervisors) and any other person present at the workplace. The definition of work or the workplace causes problems in relation to the issue of violence at work, affecting in turn the statistics on workplace violence. Standard definitions, related to physical settings, exclude many high-risk mobile or geographically diverse occupational activities such as those conducted by law enforcement officials, taxi drivers or journalists, as well as occupational groups whose work takes them to people's homes, like meter readers, plumbers and postal officials, or those who use their own homes as their workplace. Trying to meet these concerns, the ILO code of practice defines workplace as [A]ll places where workers need to be or to go by reason of their work and which are under the direct or indirect control of the employer. The code recognizes that for some parties, consideration of the prevention and aftermath of workplace violence is a human resources management issue, while for others it is a safety and health issue. It advocates a proactive approach by governments, employers, workers and their representatives, taking into consideration the occupational safety and health management systems approach. Specifically, it calls for a clear policy statement of intent to be issued and communicated by the top management. It also makes provisions regarding the allocation of responsibilities for implementation of the policy, communication to all concerned, awareness raising and social dialogue. The code proposes a risk assessment approach to the problem of violence at work, comprising control measures such as development of strategies to combat violence at the workplace, awareness-raising and cooperation on combating workplace violence; and organizational preventive measures