What do we know about this? Here are my notes, which refer to bullying at work. …
ACAS
Let’s start with ACAS.
who say
Everyone should be treated with dignity and respect at work.
They offer the following definitions
Harassment as defined in the Equality Act 2010 is:
Unwanted conduct related to a relevant protected characteristic, which has the purpose or effect of violating an individual’s dignity or creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment for that individual.
and
Bullying may be characterised as
Offensive, intimidating, malicious or insulting behaviour, an abuse or misuse of power through means that undermine, humiliate, denigrate or injure the recipient.
So Harassment relates to a protected characteristic.
There can be no “I didn’t mean it” defence to bullying although it’s not a crime, it would seem unless the bullying can be covered by the Equalities Act.
ACAS also have,
- a home page, called Bullying and Harassment
- Seeking better solutions: tackling bullying and ill-treatment in Britain’s workplaces
More Links
- From the TUC, “Bullying at Work, Guidance for workplace representatives”
- If you believe that you are being bullied the chances are you are, from the UCU
- Bullying and harassment/, from Unison
- Workplace Bullying/, from dontstickit.org.uk I found the featured picture here.
Quotes
From the Unison document,
Bullying includes:
- offensive, intimidating, malicious, or insulting behaviour;
- abuse of authority which violates the dignity of an individual or a group of people;
- creating a hostile environment against an individual;it
- the undermining, humiliation or injury of an individual.
Image Credit; this picture was found via an image search and tin eye says’ its first available at a mexican government web site. No copyright claimed/asserted. This site is non-profit, this is fair dealing. I have conducted a reasonable search to discover the copyright holder. It is used on a medium site also so they consider it is not burdened with a no commerce constraint.
Over the last year or so, there have been several major cases of bullying in government, particularly Raab and Patel. There are a number of cases bubbling under in Parliament. The Tories are trying to focus this on the the politician/civil service nexus. It’s not! Bullying is a endemic in work and often covered up or discounted. This needs to change
In looking to build a campaign, I was looking for allies and came across the national bulling helpline, and act against bullying, the latter seems more focused on bullying of children.