News
Bystanders not innocent in bullying
We are all part of the bullying problem in a workplace environment, new research shows. A study by Murdoch and Edith Cowan universities sheds light on the roles bystanders play in workplace bullying.
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Thank you for reporting this incredibly significant research on issues of bullying and related maladministration, workplace dishonesty, covering up wrongdoing etc. that costs the Australian economy billions of dollars each year, and above all severely damages and sometimes destroys the lives of direct victims of bullying, maladministration, dishonesty in the workplace etc., and also the indirect victims in terms of families, friends and colleagues.
In my nearly 28 years of adult life, 14 were in the Australian Defence Force, and 11 were at the Canberra Institute of Technology, so most of my working life has been in too significantly sized organisations which have received significant levels of media scrutiny over the past few years for their bullying practices and cultures, including Jennifer Bennett’s 16 April 2012 Campus Review article ‘CIT bullying policies failed: WorkSafe’.
In the Defence Forces there were people who knew of and joked about gang rapes but never seemed to feel a need to report these heinous crimes in support of victims and justice. I look back and feel I could have done more. At the Canberra Institute of Technology (CIT) I reported to management that two students told me they were groped or indecently assaulted by a drunk teacher at an extremely high profile CIT work related conference, but I later discovered that some at CIT were under an order to erase or otherwise not listen to my phone messages or receive my emails in which I tried to report these matters. I tried to be something more than a bystander but elaborate systems of wilful blindness were put in place to thwart my efforts to do the right thing in reporting serious and possibly criminal wrongdoing as I thought was my job as a professional teacher and public servant.
All victims of workplace bullying can take great heart from this research by Dr Paull and her team and its success in classifying and effectively exposing for all to see the different types of bystander bullying and bullies, and I’d love to see a feature length follow up on Dr Paull’s work in the Campus Review some time soon.