May 14th, 2009

Helen Green v. Deutsche Bank, UK 2006

The legal basis for this very rare legal case is the the Protection from Harassment Act. Even in the U.K. the proposed (but not yet passed as of the date of the Helen Green decision) specific anti-bullying Dignity At Work legislation. Remember that what happens in Britain does not influence legal proceedings in U.S. cases.

For a similarly successful legal outcome to happen in the U.S., the WBI anti-bullying Healthy Workplace Bill will have to be enacted and used by the courts.

The Sunday Times (London)
August 6, 2006

Bullying Court Case Led Victim to Lost Family

Jasper Gerard

THE City executive awarded 800,000 pounds compensation after years of bullying at a merchant bank has described how the traumatic court case has led to one of the most uplifting experiences of her life: the tracing of her lost family.

Helen Green, who won her case again Deutsche Bank last week, tells the story in today’s Sunday Times News Review of how she was given up for adoption aged two. Her birth to an unmarried orthodox Jew and an Italian man had caused a scandal in conservative Jewish circles in the early 1970s.

Green, 36, underwent a campaign of harassment at the hands of her co-workers at Deutsche Bank, particularly a gang of four women who continually made offensive and mocking remarks. The judge agreed that her nervous breakdown should be attributed to this “wholly abnormal stress” rather than to her troubled early years.

Green describes how, after her mother lost a custody battle, she suffered sexual abuse from her adoptive father.

Green said that in preparation for the court case Deutsche Bank had investigated her family to see if her mother was a schizophrenic and whether this could have been passed on to her.

Initially Green was horrified by the intrusion but it set off a train of events which, she says, have been more significant to her than her award.

“I was so hurt and horrified [by Deutsche's investigation],” said Green. “I didn’t even know the full circumstances of my adoption. But last year I contacted social services and discovered my natural mother had passed away two years ago; I just missed her.”

Amid this bleakness, Green finally found joy when she was united with the blood brother she had never met. “He is lovely,” Green said. “He was able to tell me so much. I feel I could write a book about my family.”

Before landing her job with Deutsche Bank, where she was appointed assistant company secretary, Green had suffered a breakdown caused by the trauma of reporting her adoptive father to the police for child abuse. Eventually she balked at testifying against him, but he was cautioned and put on the sex offenders’ register. He has since died. The bank contended that Green should have made greater disclosure about her psychiatric history prior to her appointment, but Green claimed: “Deutsche’s message is: if you have been abused you cannot work for us.”

Green said that she was not psychologically damaged by her childhood; rather it was the bullying endemic at the bank that drove her to two further breakdowns and a stint in hospital on “suicide watch”.

“I’m not some little wallflower,” she said. “I played hockey to county level, I won a golf competition. I skydived with people from the army. I am used to the odd lewd comment. I didn’t crumble at the first push.”

Green describes herself as “very proud” of winning a position at Deutsche, but her dream job degenerated into a nightmare of bullying, which the judge, Mr Justice Owen, described as a “Darwinian, survival of the fittest campaign” to undermine her. At one point a member of the “gang of four” was heard boasting to colleagues that she had nearly made Green cry.

Another colleague, Stuart Preston, was described at the trial as having behaved like a “football hooligan’”.

Green was not the first victim of the Deutsche bullies. Seven other women, the court heard, suffered “subtle” victimisation in an environment of “extreme bitchiness”.

Further evidence of the nature of bullying in the workplace has come with a poll of 3,500 victims by the Andrea Adams Trust. The poll found that humiliation and ridicule had affected 65% of respondents. Other methods of bullying included excessive monitoring, exclusion from meetings, exclusion from social events and physical abuse. Half the respondents said that the bullying had lasted more than a year, while 80% said it affected their sleep and 30% said it made them drink or smoke more.

Green’s case illustrates how bullying can destroy careers. “This case has broken my heart,” she said. “All I wanted to be was a company secretary”.

Read the related contemporaneous U.K. survey documenting employer denial of bullying’s presence

Tags: Deutsche Bank, Green, Harassment Act, UK

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