The Law Society has professed shock after discovering the extent of harassment and discrimination in legal offices. But if you look at the barriers to reporting abuse, it’s little wonder juniors refuse to come forward, writes Madeleine Holden.

For the second time this year, the legal profession has been rocked by reports that it’s a hotbed of sexual harassment and a toxic environment in which to work. Last Wednesday the Law Society released the results of a Colmar Brunton survey of 3,516 lawyers to assess the workplace environment for legal practice. The study revealed levels of sexual harassment, bullying and discrimination so prevalent that Law Society President Kathryn Beck was moved to write a letter to members declaring “a serious and systemic cultural problem in [the] profession”. Nearly one third of female lawyers have been sexually harassed during their working life, and more than half of the lawyers surveyed have been bullied. Speaking to the media, Beck expressed shock on behalf of the organisation she heads: “The stories kept coming. How big was this problem? We didn’t know. Why didn’t we know about it? We didn’t know that either.”

For many people who experience bullying, sexual harassment and discrimination in legal workplaces – especially women, young people and Māori, Pacific and Asian lawyers – these results are far from surprising. And, as victims are well aware, one of the key reasons that the Law Society has been caught unaware is that legal workplaces erect barriers to the safe reporting of these matters, especially at a managerial and HR level, meaning that the behaviour festers in darkness.

Hannah, 29, a lawyer who previously worked at controversial law firm Russell McVeagh, spoke to The Spinoff about how difficult it was for her to challenge the culture at the firm. (Hannah’s name has been changed upon request, for reasons this article will soon discuss.) She said that if junior lawyers raised problems with the culture of the firm or behavior of senior lawyers, the official response was to train the complainant to be less sensitive, rather than challenge the senior lawyer about their behaviour. “The common practice if you did go to HR was for them to send you on ‘Resilience Training’,” she explained. “This happened to a number of the girls, so they could learn how better to cope with their seniors.”

(Update: Russell McVeagh have responded to the claims made by ‘Hannah’; we have added their comments at the end of this story)

Hannah witnessed sexual harassment, verbal abuse, and physical and emotional bullying during her time at the firm. “My particular experience was after a period where we had quite an imbalance in the team, with some very strong ‘lads’ that dominated the culture,” she said. “There was a lot of pretty gross chat and generally quite offensive behaviour, both in the office and then over drinks later, which obviously escalates it all. One of the graduate lawyers I had been mentoring told me they were really struggling with the culture, and the attitudes of a particular senior in the team. At this point, the grad had been shoved into a wall by one of the seniors and told to ‘fuck off’ when he had challenged the senior for swearing abuse at someone else in the team.”

Despite the seriousness of the bullying and inappropriateness of the behaviour, Hannah told me she was discouraged by a senior associate from going to HR. “When I talked to her, she said she was hyper-aware of it and it also bothered her, but that I shouldn’t go to HR as they would just go straight to the partners and it would damage my reputation,” she said. “Her point was that nothing is confidential, particularly with HR.” Hannah’s experience led her to believe that, even if she risked her reputation by making a formal complaint, the exercise would be fruitless. “I don’t think I did [report this behaviour to HR], but I think a couple of juniors did, and I know our secretary had so many issues with one of the seniors, but no one ever did anything.”

The fear of damaging one’s reputation is an enormous disincentive to reporting harassment, bullying and discrimination in legal workplaces, as is the belief that nothing will be done even if that risk is taken. The Colmar Brunton survey identified that while misconduct of this nature is rampant throughout the industry, reporting it is relatively uncommon. For both sexual harassment and bullying, the survey found that less than one in eight of those targetted reported the harassment or made a complaint. Fear of the consequences, including impact on career prospects, was one of the most commonly cited reasons for failing to report inappropriate behaviour in the workplace – 65% of those who had personally experienced sexual harassment cited it as a barrier to reporting the behaviour – and distrust in the process or reporting outcome was cited as a reason by 57% of respondents.

As Hannah’s experience shows, this fear is quite rational. HR departments routinely respond to grievances by cautioning complainants to “keep their heads down”, or by shifting complainants, rather than perpetrators, out of their desired team. Some do nothing at all. Many smaller firms have no HR departments to speak of, meaning that complainants must raise the issue with a partner, who may be the perpetrator or have a closer relationship with the perpetrator than the complainant. For 10% of lawyers surveyed who had experienced sexual harassment, the reason cited for not reporting it was “The person I would normally report the issue to is the perpetrator”. For many lawyers, these outcomes are not worth the reputational risk. The legal industry in New Zealand is small, word travels fast, and powerless legal employees that “rock the boat” by making formal complaints or speaking to the press risk being permanently tainted as a “troublemaker” or “prude”.

Nothing confirms this fear of reputational harm quite like reporting on a story about misconduct in the legal industry: routinely, victims of harassment, bullying and discrimination are too afraid to share their accounts on record. Almost all request that their names are changed, and some decline to share their stories even under a different name, because of a fear that they’ll be identified from the details of the story alone – the more cartoonishly offensive the behaviour, the higher the risk that they’ll be recognised as the complainant. “Even if you give me a fake name, everyone will know it’s me from the story,” one source told The Spinoff, declining to share her grotesque experience of sexual harassment on the record. Almost without fail, sources use the same word to describe the level of harassment in the industry (“rife”), but few are willing to risk being identified as someone who had spoken out against their manager, partner or firm. Without stories, there can be no media coverage – another reason these anonymous results have come as a shock to the Law Society.

Discouraged from both internal and external reporting of the misconduct, many victims of sexual harassment, bullying and discrimination in legal workplaces suffer in silence. The Colmar Brunton survey has helped to confirm the prevalence of the problem, but the details of victims’ stories will not see the light of day until HR departments, managers and partners treat complaints with the seriousness they deserve, and lawyers are no longer stifled by fear of speaking out. Tackling the culture of abuse in the legal industry requires the culture of silence to be dismantled first.

Russell McVeagh responds:

We aren’t aware of the incident you refer to and we would be extremely concerned if any of our staff were treated in such a way by another member of our staff.

As you will know, Dame Margaret Bazley is conducting an independent review into our culture with respect to sexual harassment and bullying. If your source hasn’t already done so we would urge her to speak to Dame Margaret before she completes her review by calling 0800 779 779 or emailing ereview@rmcvexternal.com. Dame Margaret and her team treat all conversations with the utmost confidence.

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If a review of our public housing agency is to be taken seriously, it will need to look beyond just the immediate scandal and seek to understand how its priorities mutated into those of a callous busybody, writes Joseph Nunweek

If you’ve been reading this site and its familiars in the past fortnight, you’ll be aware of Housing New Zealand’s baseless drive to purge its rental properties of methamphetamine, criminal conduct, and wherever possible, tenants themselves. Amid confirmation from the chief science advisor that the drug contamination thresholds being relied on were bunk, no one has really covered themselves in glory.

The responsible ministers from the last government stand transformed, now bewildered and helpless victims of the science (which, as it turns out, wasn’t really science at all). The Tenancy Tribunal, as showcased in a set of decisions reviewed by Russell Brown, faces the reputational risk of being perceived as an easy rubber-stamp for quick evictions and big compensation claims, rather than an independent judicial body.

But worst of all is HNZ itself. In the meth scandal, it doubled down on its conduct even as expert and media criticism escalated, its leadership evading absolutely reasonable inquiries from journalists (Did you make innocent pensioners homeless? If so, how many?) while being paid over a thousand dollars a day.

Chief executive Andrew McKenzie kept mum until finally speaking to media including Radio New Zealand this morning, where he tendered nothing by way of resignation while also painting HNZ as helplessly at the mercy of Ministry of Health guidelines (in October 2016, the MoH’s director of protection, regulation and assurance Dr Stewart Jessamine told Radio NZ that the MoH had notified HNZ that the guidelines were only suitable for use in homes where meth had been manufactured).

There’s a lot of mealy-mouth references to “needless disruption” and not a lot to “eviction”. As housing minister Phil Twyford (who, honestly, recently offered a resignation for far less) has indicated, the whole sorry affair will be up for a review with the findings made public.

Will it go far enough? The agency’s conduct sometimes seemed less like the bumbling of middle-aged public servants trying to understand toxicology (very Roger Hall) and more like a deranged and sadistic crusade (very Moby-Dick). They celebrated $34,000 awards against their indigent ex-tenants in press releases. In internal documents, they evaluated whether they could move to force people into drug tests prior to an offer of social housing. All of which beckons an uncomfortable question – where does incompetence end and a sort of creeping insider’s malice begin?

Look at the headlines the agency made apart from meth testing in the past four years, and the cumulative picture they paint. Here’s Radio New Zealand’s Zac Fleming earlier this year, on a physically disabled 66-year-old who was taken to the Tenancy Tribunal for a small square table and a few small succulents. Housing NZ threatened her with eviction if the offending items weren’t removed from the front of her Freeman’s Bay unit. It dragged her through two fruitless hearings.

Here’s TVNZ in late 2017, reporting on HNZ’s orders that another elderly pensioner dismantle the small and solid bamboo trellis she used to support crops in her vegetable garden. They backed down after social media backlash and some terse observations from Twyford himself.

Go back a few years, to this Otago Daily Times story featuring an extremely distressing photo of tenant Taina Goodwillie preparing to say goodbye to the border collie she inherited.  In early 2014, HNZ documents released under the Official Information Act revealed a change of policy to only allow dogs at state houses “in exceptional circumstances”.

In one of the crueler things I’ve read from any provider of social services (or, look, any human), HNZ went on to state that dogs were a “barrier to independence … that made it difficult for tenants to move on”. It was agreed that any tenant who kept a dog without permission following a warning would be issued with a 90-day eviction notice. That’s Taina’s impossible position in the photo. Her shelter or the dog.

Ninety-day “no reason” eviction notices, available under the Residential Tenancies Act, have been canvassed at length by poverty and homelessness commentators. In the hands of the state housing authority, they’re an extremely powerful and brutal tool that sidesteps the rigour that would otherwise be needed to terminate a tenancy for cause.

As Katherine A Lee sets out in her recent honours thesis on HNZ and methamphetamine testing:

“Using (90-day notices) may be an easier option for a landlord who is having difficulty gaining the tenant’s consent to the property, and does not have sufficient evidence for a Tenancy Tribunal order. As long as the giving of a 90-day notice is not a retaliatory move (in response to an exercise of rights by the tenant), there is little recourse for contesting (the notice).”

“Perhaps then,” Lee suggests, “inferences can be drawn” from HNZ’s reliance on 90-day notices. That’s putting it politely.

The efforts of three Pomare women who went to the Court of Appeal to overcome the notices highlight the difficulties involved in doing so. They’d been issued with no-reason notices after occupants of their homes were arrested in a police crackdown on gang activity (the charges brought as part of that were later dismissed)

Whether Housing NZ’s conduct could be deemed a breach of the Housing Restructuring and Tenancy Matters 1992 (the law that governs it as a social housing provider, but not as a landlord), the Bill of Rights Act, or the Human Rights Act couldn’t be in issue. The Tenancy Tribunal was solely obliged to consider whether the Residential Tenancies Act had been complied with, and the higher courts couldn’t displace that.

After a million-dollar bill in legal costs over two years, HNZ relented and let all three women stay. It probably helped that the matter had the attention of the media and Opposition politicians. That level of scrutiny, until now, was rare.

Here’s some tenants who didn’t get it that I, and colleagues, recall dealing with. The man with an acquired brain injury who got into a scuffle down the road from his home, swore at his property manager afterwards and got 90 days to go. The eccentric 78-year old who tinkered with old radios and motors on the front deck of his tiny unit and wouldn’t clean it up. 90 days. The woman with a violent partner in a nasty elliptical orbit, who demanded to stay for weeks at a time then shot through for months. A HNZ investigation decided she shouldn’t have been receiving income-reduced rent. A neighbour had been interviewed and encouraged to dob her in. Ninety days and a $5000 bill for retrospectively increased arrears.

By 2016, OIA documents indicated that HNZ had applied to the Tenancy Tribunal to evict 4% of its tenants in one year. That’s one in 25 tenants, already on the bottom rung of stable and secure housing.

Of course, HNZ are only availing themselves of the same processes available to private landlords at law in New Zealand. But there’s a potent moral argument to be made that they shouldn’t – that their unique role as the country’s largest landlord to people in the greatest social need should mean they act better, and kinder, even in complex and difficult circumstances with cultural and communication barriers. The systemic behaviour above, which combined must be a remarkable drain of time, money and human resources, suggests the opposite.

An effective review of Housing NZ and what it’s become will have to draw these threads together. It’ll have to endeavour to understand how the agency’s priorities mutated into those of a callous busybody that has it in for dogs, domestic violence survivors and succulents, and it will need to recognise the denial of natural justice and human dignity that many of its policies and practices came to obfuscate.

Like a sick house, it might not immediately be apparent where the rot started, but it’s going to have to be removed if we’re to have a public landlord that’s fit for purpose again. As CEO, McKenzie cast a wide and soft hand on Morning Report in apportioning blame to “the whole organisation”. But educated, capable people in positions of management made most of these decisions and should be held accountable.

For the frontline tenancy workers and support staff at HNZ, this can’t be an easy time. Decision-makers in government are generally shielded from those they affect – the people who act as the messengers and executors are not. They have had to field abuse, threats and violence themselves. Many may have become desensitised in a role that should demand sensitivity. It’s imperative they be rehabilitated and encouraged to see their roles as working with, and not against, their tenants.

Lastly, and most importantly – beyond the victims of the meth panic, the past decade has probably seen a lot of tenants evicted on arbitrary and unreasonable bases that no social housing provider should have countenanced. Some of them will be languishing on the wait list with a mark against their record. Others may have colossal and unadjusted debts owing. If a review and reform of HNZ’s ways is to be just, some relief will need to be available to any disadvantaged person who was disadvantaged further.