In Lupita Nyong’o’s poignant Op-ed in the New York Times of October 19, 2017, entitled “Speaking Out About Harvey Weinstein”, she inspires the urgency of coming forward about abuses she endured as well. Toward the end of the Op-ed, she refers to something that I think deserves more attention than we generally pay it: the mixed messages all of us get in the form of the general adage: If you see something say something.
Ms. Nyong’o writes: “I hope we can form a community where a woman can speak up about abuse and not suffer another abuse by not being believed and instead being ridiculed. That’s why we don’t speak up — for fear of suffering twice, and for fear of being labeled and characterized by our moment of powerlessness.”
I too am appalled by the bullying of Harvey Weinstein. But at the same time, I hope there will be enough of us willing to engage in the larger discussion. I think here of how many people do not speak up about abuse and/or bullying for the same reason—for fear of being made to suffer twice.
Bullying insists on a power differential—the bully being, at least on the surface—the one to do the most damage. And yes, sometimes people do protest the bullying situation, people are there to listen and the situation is rectified. But so many times bullying is systemic and there is a collusion to keep the people in power in power while the protesting person is fired or punished or made to look crazy.
I worked with a mother of three who was referred to me for her eldest daughter, Amelia. There was a custody dispute between her and her ex-husband and a law guardian referred the case to me, to both help the child and render my professional opinion. The mother was viewed, even by the referring lawyer, as extremely anxious and as contributing to or even causing the child’s anxiety regarding visitation with her father.
There was a dynamic that seems to me to be classic: the man in the picture was charming, even charismatic, ever so sure of himself. He must be right while the mother, the clearly nervous one, must be wrong because otherwise she would be suave too. Here is the buying into a great big lie: Being smooth means being justified.
It did turn out that yes, the mother was anxious, but actually she was afraid of the father’s constant threats to sue for custody. She was also worried I would be one more person to judge her negatively. The Dad told me proudly that he threw his daughter’s boots away because they were disgusting; his whole emphasis was on her appearance and not a drop more.
Of course it doesn’t end here. There was a forensic psychologist brought in who believed everything the father was saying; he was disarmed by the father’s demeanor. He told the mother he held her accountable for Amelia’s anxiety about visitation, and that it was up to her to fix this: he told her ( I kid you not), “Children are like puppies; they can be trained to do anything”.
I felt like an outlaw, which in essence I had to be since I was the only professional that wasn’t fooled by this man. Amelia said to me, when I asked her what she would say to the judge if she had the chance: “I would say ‘please listen to a child as much as you listen to grownups’”.
In this case I am describing, it was the validating of Amelia’s experience that helped her towards increasing stability and confidence. As predicted by Amelia, her father began to lose interest. She told me, at 8 years old: “He says he loves me so much, but he just wants everyone to think he is the best person in the world.” She was right.
I know that in marriages and in parenting and in families and no doubt in professional offices and studios, the dynamics may involve the need for accountability of everyone involved. But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and sometimes the victim is telling the truth and needs to be taken seriously.
We have told our kids to speak up about bullying, to speak up if they are bullied and if they witness bullying: the latter can be of enormous help and can even save lives. And yet we have to recognize that if we ask people to say what they see, we have to be willing to listen. If not we create a climate where lying is condoned and the message barely under the surface is, “Don’t dare to cause trouble for the authorities”.
If a school will lose funding because bullying has been present in that school, or a teacher will be fired if she/he “allowed” bullying to take place in the classroom, we can see how we put into practice the opposite of what we say—how we almost induce keeping bullying under the rug. We can see how it can happen that the victim can be bullied again by authorities, who say the victim is just too sensitive.
When we can target one bully famous in the public eye, let’s say Harvey Weinstein, yes it is an inspiring and well earned moment to have the support that feels like it will end bullying in a given field.
However we also need the same kind of outrage at the kind of story I told about Amelia, a true one. I was hired to give my professional opinion and when I did, nobody involved wanted to hear it. My opinion was inconvenient for the male judge and the male psychologist who found the father convincing and the female social worker who found him ever so charming.
When we say to report bullying, we have to be sure that what follows is not just more damage.