Website offers support for victims of bullying

Holly Snape

The Bully Busters initiative targeted at providing help and advice to those bullied in the workplace has launched a website, and coordinator Holly Snape encouraged anyone feeling isolated or bullied to make the online forum their first port of call.

She said the hope was the forum would provide an opportunity for people to talk about what was happening to them and realise there are others experiencing similar situations.

"We find what happens in workplace bullying is it's about isolating people and people end up feeling shame and separation from the group," said Ms Snape.

She said everybody had their own way of managing workplace relationships and bullying, and often the best advice could come from others rather than a legal professional.

She said there was confusion within the field as to where the problem sits, whether it should be dealt with under employment law or even health and safety.

"There are a number of cases that haven't adequately been addressed through an employment process because there isn't the legislation in place to support the worker and in many ways to support the employer so everyone knows how it is that you move forward to address something like that in a productive way."

She said the goal wasn't to be adversarial but to produce healthy, productive workplaces. One of the targets for the advocacy group was to help pave a way to create a more applicable set of legislation.

There are also plans for an 0800 number to be manned by volunteers which Ms Snape said would hopefully be up and running early next year.

"We want to be able to put resources on the website for people who want to identify if they are being bullied, or that give advice to people about steps to start taking to support a case if there is an ongoing issue," she said.

Bully Busters was the brainchild of Ms Snape and CultureSafe director Allan Halse, who wanted a not-for-profit organisation running congruently to the CultureSafe service.

Mr Halse said CultureSafe was doing better than he would like it to be.

"Everywhere I look it's ugly. I've probably got more than 50 clients and some are really quite high-profile. So far today I've booked four mediations for December. It's like an epidemic."

He said the more you look at the topic the more evident it becomes that things will get worse with a disconnect between the Health and Safety Act and the Employment Relations Act.

He said mediation would too often end in monetary compensation, which failed to resolve the issue itself and often meant the situation repeated itself as most settlements were kept confidential.

"It can only get worse until someone's prepared to look at the issue and say this is the problem - and the problem put simply is there's no justice for the victims of workplace bullying."

Ms Snape said the long-term target was to have a nationwide service.