Kate Hawkesby: The ugly truth about bullying in schools and workplaces

The amount of bullying in the workplace seems to be finally making its way into the news - which, like all disgusting behaviour, is good if it opens it up for more scrutiny.

The over-arching view, ask anyone in any workplace, is that bullying is rampant - and not properly addressed by management.

Having worked in newsrooms since the age of 21, I know how difficult it can be to speak up. Most of us don't want to rock the boat.

The same can be said of sexual harassment in the workplace: that's something we can thank the 'Me Too' movement for - giving people a platform to speak up without fear of retribution.

We are of course often only aware of things happening inside our own bubbles: when they're happening to us, or to people around us.

As parents, for example, we are well aware of the prevalence of bullying in schools. We are also aware of the inability of schools to competently deal with it. No matter how tough a school may say its anti-bullying policy is, it exists everywhere and is very difficult to shut down.

It's often overt and insidious. But is it also the learning ground for the behaviour of adults who bully? Just like schools struggle to deal with bullying, so it seems do workplaces.

Take the bullying nurses endure for example. It's been well documented, as has the DHBs' attempts to deal with it, with limited success. In fact, bullying and harassment numbers in hospitals, are actually rising.

Does that mean there are more cases per se, or just more being reported? It's not just nurses either, junior doctors are bullied by senior ones, medical students are bullied by junior doctors, it's happening at every level.

The consequences of bullying are far reaching. It's driven many people out of their chosen profession, not to mention had woeful effects on mental and physical health - and as we know, can even lead to death.

The old attitude of 'suck it up', thankfully, is proving no longer acceptable. But that attitude has been prevalent and I don't doubt still is, in many workplaces.

Whenever the issue of bullying is raised, you will hear the people at the responsible end of the spectrum: the managers, the school boards, the DHBs all saying the same thing. 'We take it very seriously, we work hard to provide a safe environment, we have strategies in place to counter it, we encourage a healthy culture for our students or employees'... those are the lines you will most often hear in relation to bullying claims.

Those words are all designed to shut things down, sweep it all away, nothing to see here. They're great words, but they're just that: words. It's not working.

What I'd love to see is a manager or school principal who stands up and says this is appalling, it's on all of us to fix it, we haven't done enough, our culture and our systems are broken.

Acknowledging the truth, facing it down, and then instead of words, finding the actions that will fix it.