How to create a culture of non-reporting

As a safety advisor for 15 years in the corporate world, managing the fallout from incidents, the commonest thing I had to ‘evangelise’ about was, “Report, report, report… we cannot do anything to reduce risk if we don’t know what problems happen, how often they happen, and how and why they happen.”

This was complementary to proactive efforts to observe operations and interact with employees before incidents occurred. I was either a member or a representative of the management team, but also kind of a chaplain to workers. My experience in helping manage safety was organisations genuinely sought to improve safety culture — management genuinely wanted to manage the work well.

Now, I realise that in this context we’re not often talking about sexual abuse — we’re talking workplace issues. But I can tell you, workplace issues do become highly emotive. High stakes are involved. Unions are involved. Clashes occur. And abuse happens within workplaces, too. A lot. And there were several workplace abuse issues investigated under my watch.

Then I read about a university that sets their reporting culture up under four words:

You Report. We Decide.

Whoa!

You Report. We Decide.
On a report form for people reporting cases of sexual abuse!

I can tell you what kind of culture you’d be driving if that was the succinct message you’re sending out. “Don’t report. [This is really what we’re saying] [Well… you can try to… but remember, we decide.] [We have the power to do that, and, even though we won’t say this overtly, we want you to know that.] We have the knowledge and skill to properly investigate the matter. [Well, we think so, and our biases and interests will surely run contrary at times to the truth.] Trust us.”

Many kinds of incidents, of which abuse is a good example, require independent investigations, by competent authorities, who deal forensically and discover the truth.

When you say “You Report. We Decide.” you drive a culture of non-reporting, because you’re going to drive truth underground. Anyone who would report abuse is already wondering about the wisdom in such action, no matter how right it is to do such a thing.

Nobody ever reports abuse thinking,
“this is a wise thing to do,”
because culturally they’re already thinking,
“I’m not going to be believed.”

We faced the same opposition in the workplace. People don’t want to draw negative attention to themselves even if the management team are genuinely trying to make an operation as efficient and as safe as possible. And good management teams understand this.

All organisations — churches, not-for-profits, and ministries included — must know that the human norm is to not report, for fear of repercussions.

Reporting abuse is always a risk for the person reporting, because, in exposing truth they expose themselves to further, and even more potent attack.

Healthy organisational cultures will endeavour to work with these frailties of human vulnerability, seeing justice as the opportunity to manage well.