Social Justice Report 2011 Table of Contents a cause for cautious optimism: The year in review 13 1Introduction 13

I discuss the damage lateral violence is doing in our organisations in more detail in the accompanying Native Title Report 2011 where I specifically look at its impacts on Prescribed Bodies Corporate.

In addition to undermining the performance of our organisations, lateral violence as workplace bullying appears to be having negative impacts on employment retention.

4. 
   Workplace bullying and employment retention
   

Bullying and harassment in the workplace is increasingly being recognised as having negative impacts on employment retention for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.²⁴⁰ This type of behaviour is lateral violence.

Workplace bullying is a challenge that is confronting Australia as a nation. It is estimated that between 2.5 and 5 million people will experience workplace harassment at some time during their career and that the costs of workplace bullying could be as much as $36 billion per year when the hidden and opportunity costs are considered.²⁴¹

Workplace bullying appears to have a disproportionate effect on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers. A graphic example is the experience of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health workers who have higher levels of burnout, absenteeism, chronic illness related to stress and lower retention rates.²⁴²

Josie Winsor argues that Aboriginal and Torres Strait health workers feel as though they are ‘caught in a vice getting pressure from all sides’.²⁴³ Issues of powerlessness are played out within the profession as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health workers are constantly reminded that they are at the ‘bottom of the health system ladder’,²⁴⁴ despite the fact that their work requires immense skill and dedication.

The identity issues surrounding lateral violence also affect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health workers as they suffer criticism from their communities. Kathy Abbott, a respected Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health worker, describes some of this criticism which includes snide comments like, ‘She’s walking around with them doctors, she must be one of them’,²⁴⁵ highlighting the problems Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health workers have in being accepted in both the medical world and their own communities.

This tension around identity is not only a problem for health workers. I have heard similar issues raised by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who have had success in many different areas. Another aspect of the cyclical nature of lateral violence is that people who are seen as successful are often the targets of lateral violence in their communities because they are seen as ‘coconuts’ or not ‘community’ enough. To avoid further victimisation, these individuals can disengage from their communities because it is not worth the risk of such hurt. Paradoxically, this leads to further questions about their community connections and ‘authenticity’ as an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person.

Further compounding this, Josie Winsor explains that lateral violence is not only damaging work environments for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health workers, but also extends to their home life:

[T]he unusual situation of the Aboriginal health worker is that we work and live in the same community and the ‘horizontal violence’ is not only experienced within the workplace, but also in our personal lives.²⁴⁶

Of course, this does not just apply to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health workers but all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who work in their community:

These people don’t knock off work at five or even have a weekend off. They are often paid for a forty hour week but often or more likely work sixty or seventy. The pressures they face are phenomenal. They are often the people who are in a volunteer capacity on several committees; they do this out of hours on top of their normal job. They are often the people who get many calls ‘out of hours’… They are mediators in conflict, they are bearers of news when someone has passed away, they do eulogies, they are also mothers, fathers, uncles, aunties, and they are often the back bone of a community. In many cases they are also subjected to extreme incidents of lateral violence.²⁴⁷

Again, this affects not only Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who work in the community but indeed anyone who has a good understanding of how the system works and can offer support in times of crisis. When you add this to existing work commitments, you can see how many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in the workforce have immense burdens to carry.

Bearing this in mind, the burnout, stress and absenteeism are not surprising. Living and working in caustic environments further compounds trauma which deepens the cycle of lateral violence.

The Australian Public Service Commission’s 2009 Census Report has provided further anecdotal evidence of the negative impacts of bullying within the workplace.

• 
  Indigenous employees were twice as likely as non-Indigenous employees Australian Public Service (APS) wide to report that they had experienced discrimination, bullying and/or harassment in their agency in the last 12 months.
  
• 
  Just over one in four (27%) Indigenous employees reported that they had experienced bullying and/or harassment in the workplace in the last 12 months. This is an increase from 23% in 2005.
  
• 
  Those who have experienced harassment and/or bullying are almost twice as likely as those who haven’t to ‘signal their intention to leave the APS in the next three years’.²⁴⁸
  

In addition to this research, I have been informed on multiple occasions when discussing lateral violence that it is a key contributing factor that is driving our people out of the workforce or discouraging them from engaging with it.

The evidence base casually linking lateral violence to employment retention requires bolstering. However, the current available evidence would appear to support the idea that lateral violence is one inhibiting factor that is undermining the achievements of the COAG Closing the Gap target in relation to employment rates.

2. 
   Social and emotional impacts of lateral violence
   

Social and emotional wellbeing is the way Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders describe the ‘importance of connection to land, culture, spirituality, ancestry, family and community, and how these affect the individual’.²⁴⁹ Lateral violence assaults individual and community wellbeing, so it seems common sense that there are also profound social and emotional wellbeing impacts.

Given that lateral violence is such a new area of inquiry in Australia, it is not surprising that research looking at the links between lateral violence and social and emotional wellbeing has not been done yet. Similarly, social and emotional wellbeing is a holistic way of looking at what helps and hinders individuals, so it would be counter productive to reduce the complexity of social and emotional wellbeing to the single factor of lateral violence.

However, based on the conversations that I have had with people and the emerging international literature around social and emotional wellbeing and cultural safety,²⁵⁰ I think it would be remiss to ignore lateral violence as part of the complex mix of factors that impact negatively on social and emotional wellbeing. Just because we don’t have definitive data yet doesn’t mean that people aren’t suffering. An important step in combating lateral violence is that we openly acknowledge the harm it is inflicting in our communities.

While research has recently shown that 90% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders reported feeling ‘happy’ most/all/some of the time we cannot deny the severity of mental health problems in our communities.²⁵¹ The most recent Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage report updates some of the key indicators of mental health and social and emotional wellbeing problems facing our communities. Text Box 2.13 provides a summary from this report.

Text Box 2.13: Social and Emotional Wellbeing Indicators

Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage 2011 reported that: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders reported experiencing a high/very high level of psychological distress at two and a half times the rate for nonIndigenous people (32% compared to 12%).^252 Between 2004–05 and 2008 the proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders experiencing a high/very high level of psychological distress increased from 27% to 32%, while the proportion of nonIndigenous people remained relatively stable, leading to an increase in the gap.^253 From 2004–05 to 2008–09 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders were hospitalised for mental and behavioural disorders at around 1.7 times the rate for non-Indigenous people.^254 In 2005–2009, after taking into account the different age structures of the two populations, for those jurisdictions for which suicide death data are available, the suicide death rate for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders was 2.5 times the rate for nonIndigenous people (figure 7.8.1).^255 After adjusting for differences in the age structure of the two populations, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders were hospitalised for non-fatal intentional self-harm at two and a half times the rate for non-Indigenous people (3.5 per 1 000 compared to 1.4 per 1 000 in 2008-09).^256