Understanding the Impact of Whistleblowing

UNDERSTANDING THE IMPACT OF WHISTLEBLOWING


1. What is whistleblowing?
Whistleblowing is “the disclosure by organization members (former or current) of illegal, immoral, or illegitimate practices under the control of their employers, to persons or organizations that may be able to effect action” (Near & Miceli, 1985, p.4, cited in Suskind, 2024).

2. How have whistleblowers’ actions benefitted society?
“Whistleblowers’ actions have saved the lives of employees, consumers, and the general public, as well as billions of dollars in shareholder and taxpayer funds. Whistleblowers have averted nuclear accidents, exposed large-scale corporate fraud, and reversed the approval of unsafe prescription drugs” (Devine & Maassarani, 2011, p. 4). When whistleblowers’ concerns have not been heeded, consequences such as the Challenger space shuttle disaster, the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and the financial ruin caused by the Bernard Madoff scandal (Devine & Maassarani, 2011, p.3; pp. 32-33) have been the result.

3. What traits do many whistleblowers share?
a. “According to research, whistleblowers share common characteristics, including a strong ethical identity, moral courage, and tenacity to act in the face of injustice, viewing disclosure of harm and wrongdoing as an obligation, not a choice, even when it comes as the cost of their reputation and career, as it unfortunately so often does” (Mesmer-Magnus & Viswesvaran, 2005; Ozdemir, 2013; and Perron et al., 2020, cited in Suskind, 2024).

b. Whistleblowers “tend to be highly educated and, prior to the disclosure of wrongdoing, are regarded as well-respected, high-achieving bridge-builders at their organization” (Ahern, 2018, cited in Suskind, 2024).

c. Whistleblowers “are often professional idealists and loyal organization adherents who were not aware of the dangers and consequences of disclosure. Instead, whistleblowers often earnestly trust their organization and believe it will take action to address the issues raised” (Gjøvik, 2023).

d. “Many whistleblowers speak up because they believe in formal procedures and justice, never expecting an antagonistic response. Many whistleblowers also expect that taking the matter to a regulatory body will finally deliver law and order to the situation, but instead are often met with even more threats and retaliation, now by the government agencies supposedly chartered to protect them” (Gjøvik, 2023).

4. What kinds of retaliation do whistleblowers experience?
Gjøvik (2023) summarizes existing research showing that “whistleblower retaliation is common and severe,” and notes that “In addition to counter-accusations and job loss, retaliation may include: demotion, harassment, decreased quality of working conditions, threats, reassignment to degrading work, character assassination, reprimands, denigration, punitive transfers, increase in workload, smear campaigns, surveillance, rumors, deny listing from their field of work, denial of promotions, overly critical performance reviews, double-binding, the ‘cold shoulder,’ referral to psychiatrists, manufacturing personal and/or professional problems, exclusion from meetings, insults, retaliatory lawsuits, stalking, ostracism, petty harassment, abuse, bullying, doxing, vandalism and destruction of personal property, police reports and arrests, and even harm to the whistleblower’s own
body through physical attacks and sexual assaults, to the extent of assassination.”

5. How are whistleblowers impacted by retaliation?
a. A retaliation lawsuit “commonly takes two to three years and may last more than a decade for a complex, controversial case” (Devine & Maassarani, 2011, p. 17).

b. Although “in movies and magazines, the media glorifies those who risk everything to expose corruption, greed, and illegal activity,” the “majority of whistleblowers suffer in obscurity, frustrated by burned career bridges and vindication they were never able to obtain. The prominent, lionized beacons of hope are the rare exception, and even most of them pay a horrible price with lifelong scars” (Devine & Maassarani, 2011, p. 18).

c. In what Devine and Maassarani (2011, p. 17) describe as “perhaps the most comprehensive survey of whistleblowers in the academic literature,” authors Joyce Rothschild and Terance D. Miethe reported that “the majority of the whistle-blowers suffered intensely. The most common fallout from their whistleblowing involved: (a) severe depression or anxiety (84 percent), (b) feelings of isolation or powerlessness (84 percent), (c) distrust of others (78 percent), (d) declining physical health (69 percent), (e) severe financial decline (66 percent), and (f) problems with family relations (53 percent). Repeatedly, respondents mentioned that whistleblowing undermined their trust in others. These numbers are extremely high; however, the numbers cannot convey the emotional distress that we heard from so many of our respondents.”

d. Most whistleblowers get fired, never get their jobs back, and either never work again at all or never work in their field again (Alford, 2001, pp. 19-20; Devine & Maassarani, 2011, p. 30). Among those who do find work again, it is rarely at the same level as the position they lost. “A typical fate is for a nuclear engineer to end up selling computers” (Alford, 2001, p. 20).

e. Devine and Maassarani (2011, p. 16) emphasize that “Above all, being a whistleblower is lonely and stressful. You may not be a welcome member of your professional community anymore….Co-workers may shun you out of fear, while others are reduced to whispering their admiration in the bathroom. [Whistleblower trauma expert] Professor Alford targets this isolation as more emotionally painful than tangible retaliation. ‘What bothers whistleblowers most [is] not that the boss retaliated…but that colleagues they thought were friends, colleagues with whom some whistleblowers had spent more time than their families, refused to recognize the whistleblower.’”

6. Why are whistleblowers so traumatized?
a. Whistleblowers suffer from a uniquely damaging type of trauma caused by DARVO—the institutional and corporate legal defense strategy commonly used against whistleblowers.

b. What is DARVO?
Coined by Dr. Jennifer Freyd in 1997, DARVO “stands for ‘Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.’ The perpetrator or offender may Deny the behavior, Attack the individual doing the confronting, and Reverse the roles of Victim and Offender such that the perpetrator assumes the victim role and turns the true victim -- or the whistle blower -- into an alleged offender. This occurs, for instance, when an actually guilty perpetrator assumes the role of ‘falsely accused’ and attacks the accuser's credibility and blames the accuser of being the perpetrator of a false accusation” (Freyd, 2024).

c. What is the purpose of false DARVO charges? The dual purpose of false DARVO charges is “to both discredit and exhaust the whistleblower” and causes whistleblowers to become “intent on clearing their names and reputations” after placing them “in a position similar to someone who spent 10 years in jail for a crime he didn’t commit” (Ahern, interviewed by Oransky, 2018).

d. What is institutional DARVO or Institutional Betrayal? Institutional DARVO “occurs when the DARVO is committed by an institution (or with institutional complicity) as when police charge rape victims with lying. Institutional DARVO is a pernicious form of institutional betrayal” (Freyd, 2024).

e. How severe is the trauma suffered by whistleblowers?
Whistleblowers “pay an enormous personal and professional price for their actions” Devine & Maassarani, 2011, p. 15). Many whistleblowers develop a trauma and stressor-related disorder with PTSD-like symptoms (Suskind 2024; Garrick 2022) which sometimes proves fatal, as in the case of Boeing whistleblower John Barnett (Adary et al., 2024; Bedigan, 2024). The whistleblower experience often leaves survivors’ minds “stuck in static time,” their lives paralyzed by the trauma (Alford, 2015).

7. How effective are current whistleblower protections?
Not effective at all.
a. According to Devine and Maassarani (2011, p. 161), corporate whistleblower law “is a patchwork of inconsistent protections. With scattered exceptions, if you file a lawsuit, you are sentencing yourself to an administrative process with short, unforgiving deadlines and a maze of bureaucratic procedures. Decisions are seldom issued in less than two to three years, and most statutes do not offer any chance for interim relief. If formal vindication is your goal, the odds are extremely long. At the end of the process, you will likely have spent years and five or six figures for results that predictably rubberstamp whatever retaliation you challenged.”

b. While there are dramatic exceptions, the average “successful” settlements achieved via government regulators such as the Department of Labor “tend to be paltry compared with loss of job and likely blacklisting….Furthermore, the price of this token compensation is frequently professional exile. One-third of [Department of Labor] settlements include banishment clauses, where the employee is barred from working for the same company or even within the industry” (Devine & Maassarani, 2011, p. 167).

c. In a similar vein, Gjøvik (2023) writes that “Whistleblowers are desperately needed, yet U.S. whistleblower protection laws…dependably fail to actually protect employees….Indeed, it is a cruel lie to call these laws ‘protections’ when the best they offer is a small chance for an insufficient ‘remedy’ after the fact—and even that still requires years of additional abuse and subjugation to obtain. Further, once an employee goes to a regulator in the U.S., there is a significant chance the employee will face additional retaliation by the regulator on behalf of the corporation or in support of business interests generally.”

8. What is “regulatory capture” or “corporate capture”?
Regulatory capture (or corporate capture) is what happens when governmental regulatory agencies “become dominated by the interests of the industries they regulate” (Devine & Maassarani, 2011, p.91) or by “business interests generally” (Gjøvik, 2023). Regulatory capture may be “achieved through the hiring of industry loyalists, a policy shift from oversight to cooperation with the regulated industry, or even bribery” (Devine & Maassarani, 2011, p. 91).

9. Why is regulatory capture a problem?
a. “In instances of regulatory capture, whistleblowing on corporate misconduct is a threat to the regulatory agency as well….In those circumstances, the agency will conduct a sham investigation that finds your claim lacks merit, leaving you without further protection from employer retaliation. Sometimes you will find yourself a target, instead of or in addition to your allegations, and the subsequent report openly attacks your actions or credibility” (Devine & Maassarani, 2011, p. 91).

b. Since “few whistleblowers can afford to finance a lawsuit when they are unemployed and facing years of blacklisting,” filing complaints with governmental regulatory agencies is often the only financially realistic option for most whistleblowers (Devine & Maassarani, 2011, p. 166).

c. If there is no realistic chance of success in filing a complaint due to regulatory capture, the procedure “becomes a trap that reinforces legal wrongs, not rights” (Devine & Maassarani ,2011, p. 165) and “employees would be better off not acting on their rights rather than spend time and money for a predictable rubber stamp of whatever harassment they challenge” (Devine & Maassarani, 2011, p. 171). This status quo “deters would-be whistleblowers from coming forward instead of deterring institutions from engaging in misconduct” (Gjøvik, 2023).

References

Adary, S., Sabol, B. & Gartner, J. (2024, May 18). Police release investigation report of Boeing whistleblower death. KWCH. https://www.kwch.com/2024/05/18/police-release-investigation-report-boeing-whistleblower-death/

Ahern, K. (2018). Institutional betrayal and gaslighting: Why whistle-blowers are so traumatized. The Journal of Perinatal & Neonatal Nursing, 32(1), 59–65. https://doi.org/10.1097/JPN.0000000000000306

Alford, C.F. (2001). Whistleblowers: Broken lives and organizational power. Cornell University Press.

Alford, C.F. (2015, April 17). The trauma of whistleblowers: stuck in static time. Trauma Theory. https://traumatheory.com/the-trauma-of-whistleblowers-stuck-in-static-time/

Bedigan, M. (2024, June 18). Dead Boeing whistleblower’s family says company may not have ‘pulled the trigger’ but it’s responsible. The Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/boeing-whistleblower-death-john-barnett-b2564688.html

Devine, T., Maassarani, T. F., & Government Accountability Project. (2011). The corporate whistleblower's survival guide: a handbook for committing the truth. Berrett-Koehler.

Freyd, J.J. (1997). Violations of power, adaptive blindness, and betrayal trauma theory. Feminism & Psychology, 7, 22-32. https://dynamic.uoregon.edu/jjf/articles/freyd97r.pdf

Freyd, J.J. (2024, July 13). What is DARVO? Freyd Dynamics Lab. Retrieved July 13, 2024 from https://dynamic.uoregon.edu/jjf/defineDARVO.html

Garrick, J. (2018). Whistleblowers of America peer support mentor training manual.

Garrick, J. (2022, March 2). Whistleblower retaliation is a PTSD serious injury. LinkedIn.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/whistleblower-retaliation-ptsd-serious-injury-jackie-garrick/

Gjøvik, A. (2023, April 30). Whistleblowers are the conscience of society, yet suffer gravely for trying to hold the rich and powerful accountable for their sins. LLRX (Law and Technology Resources for Legal Professionals). https://www.llrx.com/2023/04/whistleblowers-are-the-conscience-of-society/

Mesmer-Magnus, J. R., & Viswesvaran, C. (2005). Whistleblowing in organizations: An examination of correlates of whistleblowing intentions, actions, and retaliation. Journal of Business Ethics, 62(3), 277–297.

Near, J. P., & Miceli, M. P. (1985). Organizational dissidence: The case of whistle-blowing. Journal of Business Ethics, 4(1), 1–16.

Oransky, I. (2018, July 30). How institutions gaslight whistleblowers—and what can be done. Retraction Watch. (2018, July 30). https://retractionwatch.com/2018/07/30/how-institutions-gaslight-whistleblowers-and-what-can-be-done/

Özdemir, M. (2013). The relationship of organizational corruption with organizational dissent and whistleblowing in Turkish schools. Cukurova University Faculty of Education Journal, 42(1).

Perron, A., Rudge, T., & Gagnon, M. (2020). Hypervisible nurses: effects of circulating ignorance and knowledge on acts of whistleblowing in health. Ans. Advances in Nursing Science, 43(2), 114–131.

Suskind, D. (2024, April 12). Blowing the whistle on harmful behaviors at work. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/bully-wise/202404/blowing-the-whistle-on-harmful-behaviors-at-work