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When we think of bullying, we often immediately presume that the person experiencing bullying is a child, and the place they’re experiencing it is school.
But being an adult is no guarantee that bullying won’t be an aspect of your life, or that your workplace will be a bully-free zone. And managing the situation can be extremely difficult and hugely stressful.
Lucy
Lucy used to teach in a special school. Her experience of bullying was enough to make her leave her job, she says. “It’s very different within the education system when you’re being bullied.
“There are a number of things that make you more vulnerable, for example not being of a certain faith. Principals have a lot of power and they can make life extremely difficult for you and while they might not necessarily be the bully, they do not actually want to address bullying issues in schools for a number of reasons.”
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Lucy says that when she was teaching, “one SNA initiated a concerted campaign against me. It was so bad that my students actually noticed it.”
Lucy says the behaviour “impinged my ability to actually support the children and do my job effectively. I did do it, but at extreme personal cost to myself. She never said hello to me in the mornings. She would not follow instructions in the classroom. She would disappear from my classroom for periods of times without any explanation. And when she was asked to give me the heads up in terms of leaving the classroom, she wouldn’t do it.”
Bullying in schools: how it’s changed and how to handle it
Lucy says the SNA would “push back” against Lucy’s ambitions for her students and she was “extremely disrespectful” to Lucy in the classroom. She was “very rude” and “shouted”.
Lucy tried to raise the issue “in a nice way” with the SNA involved. “I asked her ‘Have I done something wrong? Have I offended you? If I have, please let me know,’ but the SNA denied there was any issue.”
The impact of the situation on Lucy was significant, she says. “I was physically sick a few times in school.”
She considered taking things further, but was advised by a colleague that if she did that, she could be putting herself in danger. “The reason for it is that I worked in a school where the children had the potential to be quite violent. They said to me, ‘She mightn’t come as quick to help you if you were in a dangerous situation.’ I have had desks thrown at me, chairs thrown at me.
“I did actually contact the union and they said to me, ‘Oh, you’re going to have to document everything’ in terms of bringing a complaint because she has the right to due process... if I documented everything, I would be spending the whole day documenting and at the end of the day I’m there to actually teach a class. It’s an onerous obligation really.”
Lucy said a complaint was made about her personal hygiene to the school principal, which she suspects was made by the SNA. “When I told two of my colleagues about the situation, they started to laugh and they said, ‘If you had an issue with your personal hygiene, we would have told you.’ It pulled the rug from underneath me.
“There was culture in the school of tolerating extremely unacceptable behaviour in staff. Eventually, what happened was I actually decided to leave the school. I went into counselling and the counsellor told me that for my own wellbeing and health, I needed to leave the school. So, I gave up a permanent job at a time when there weren’t that many permanent jobs.”
Lucy feels “there’s a lot of focus in the Department of Education on student wellbeing and anti-bullying for students, but there is rife bullying going on in the education system with staff. Teachers and SNAs’ health is being adversely impacted. And if teachers and staff aren’t supported when there is bullying in the school, how can they be expected to stand up and support children?”
[ Workplace bullying: ‘Every incident has never left my head. I will never get over it’ ]
Phil
Phil Quinlan, author of And a Bang on the Ear, was left with a prominent limp and spasticity down his right-hand side after a horrific sporting injury in school. “I was thrown into a teenage hormone-infused school where lads decided I was a very easy target. At that age the meaning of life is to fit in, not to stand out. I didn’t fit in and I could barely stand up,” he says. “I was pushed over, shouldered against walls on corridors and left lying in a heap on the floor to a few laughs.”
But Phil’s experience of bullying wasn’t restricted to school. Within the workforce he also found himself dealing with bullies, he explains. “I was excluded from everything,” he says of one particular job. “I felt like an outcast. I was looked down on by everybody. I spent my lunch breaks hiding in the toilets reading. I counted the minutes on my Casio digital watch until I could go home.”
Phil left this job after five months.
Some years later, after a period of travel, he began a new job. After several happy years, his experiences shifted with a change in boss. Phil says his new boss “had it in for me from the start”.
“Every chance she got she’d take me into the conference room and berate me for silly things, once asking if I had a hearing problem. She’d belittle me in front of colleagues and I stopped going to the canteen because of the pains of going that far only to be talked down to over my chicken sandwich.
“She reprimanded me every time I went to leave for the day on time, because I didn’t have kids to go home to. I had a lot of physio appointments to attend. This meant nothing to her. Her kids trumped my deteriorating health.”
Phil left his job a few years later. “Fight or flight,” he says.
[ How to spot a workplace bully ]
Audrey
Audrey worked in the pharmaceutical industry and describes her experience of bullying as “bizarre” and something she had never experienced before.
“This situation evolved where, with this particular individual, I just never knew what to expect. What made it difficult was how she was with me in front of other people. And how she was generally with other people was vastly different from the way she interacted with me and how she was on a one-to-one basis.
“At one point in time we would have been peers,” Audrey explains. “Not that anything excuses particular behaviour if it’s somebody in a more senior position, but it was a real case of I really don’t understand why this is happening. She would have made me doubt myself a lot. She was very good at telling me what to do, even though I didn’t really believe it was her place to do so.
“Because of how other people perceived her, I didn’t really feel like I could go to anybody to openly talk about it. I genuinely didn’t think anybody would believe me”.
Belittling comments and cold and authoritative criticisms were commonplace in their interactions. “She would have been very deceiving in that there were times when her behaviour made me think that maybe things had changed. There was a warmth or a conversation that was on a personal level and I’d come away thinking, maybe I have this all wrong. And then, boom, something else would happen and I would think how am I continually letting this happen?”
Audrey says she did ask the person involved to meet her and discuss things. “I was sick at the prospect of doing it.” The meeting was arranged to take place in a senior manager’s office, something Audrey feels was deliberate to convey a “you are less than me” message.
During the meeting, Audrey said she raised her concerns, but “me being me, I got upset when I started talking about it. She was one of these stone-cold people. She would never show any sort of emotion like that, so again I came out of it feeling my God you’ve just let yourself down again.”
Audrey says the period was “one of the most difficult times I’ve had in my life. It was absolutely horrific. I used to talk about it ad nauseam with my other half. And if he had had his way at the time, I’d have just left because of the impact it was having on me.
“It was this horrible situation where she had this knack of everybody loved her and it’s like nobody, bar one person, in the organisation could see [what she was like].
“I did go on in later years to have a conversation with somebody else who would have been in the organisation, who would have been my boss at time, and she was absolutely flabbergasted that this had gone on. She said ‘I never saw an impact on you and I never saw the potential in her’.
“If she was somebody who portrayed herself like that and behaved like that with everybody, I actually think it would have been easier because then at least I wouldn’t have felt, a) am I going mad? b) is it just me? and c) everybody else would have been aware of it.
“In domestic situations you hear about the mental abuse side of things and that’s actually almost what I imagine it might be akin to in terms of somebody who has the ability to make you doubt something that you actually deep down know is not the case”.
- (names in this article have been changed.)
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