Surprise .. not!
The topic of bullying is personal to Erika Harold, Executive Director of the Illinois Supreme Court Commission on Professionalism (“the Commission”). “I experienced pervasive racial and sexual harassment in high school that went unresolved by school administrators. I ultimately had to transfer schools,” she said. Harold added, “In a diary I kept at the time, I vowed to make an impact on the culture of bullying if I ever had the opportunity.”
That opportunity came when she was crowned Miss America 2003. Traveling across the U.S., she spoke to more than 100,000 young people about bullying in schools to “shift people’s perceptions and motivate leaders to take this issue more seriously.”
After graduating from Harvard Law School, Harold was dismayed to discover that bullying seemed “normalized and even sometimes celebrated in the legal profession.” Yet, “there was a lack of data and discussion about it,” she said.
A second opportunity presented itself when she became Executive Director of the Illinois Supreme Court Commission on Professionalism. Under her leadership, the Commission launched one of the first large-scale studies in the U.S. on bullying in the legal profession. They partnered with The Red Bee Group, a Chicago-based consulting firm with experience conducting wide-scale surveys for other legal organizations, including the ABA. The report’s authors and principals from The Red Bee Group, Stephanie A. Scharf and Roberta D. Liebenberg, define bullying as “inappropriate behavior intended to intimidate, humiliate, or control the actions of another person, including verbal, nonverbal, or physical acts.”
The resulting report found that nearly a quarter of the 6,000 Illinois lawyers surveyed had experienced workplace bullying during a one-year period. Particularly noteworthy, the rates of bullying were highest among attorneys aged 25 to 35, female attorneys, and attorneys with disabilities. Thirty-nine percent of attorneys aged 25 to 35 reported having experienced bullying compared to 12% of attorneys aged 66 to 75. Thirty-eight percent of female attorneys said they experienced bullying, compared to 15% of male lawyers. Similarly, 38% of attorneys with disabilities said they experienced bullying, compared to 23% of lawyers without a disability.
Also bullied were 36% of Middle Eastern/North African lawyers, 35% of Black/African American lawyers, 34% of Hispanic lawyers, 32% of multiracial lawyers, and 28% of Asian American lawyers, compared to 23% of white lawyers who reported being bullied. In addition, 29% of lawyers who are gay, lesbian, or bisexual were the target of verbal bullying related to their sexual orientation, while 3% of heterosexual lawyers were verbally bullied related to their sexual orientation.
Wendy Shiba, Chair of the ABA’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Center (DEI Center) and a principal of The Red Bee Group, pointed out that the groups identified in the report as being disproportionately impacted by bullying are the same groups represented by the ABA’s DEI Center “in furtherance of Goal III, to eliminate bias and enhance diversity in the legal profession.” Based on her work, Shiba added, “Intersectionality compounds the phenomenon, with attorneys having two or more of the underrepresented characteristics being especially vulnerable.”
Teresa Schmid, who directs the ABA Center for Professional Responsibility, stated that bullying in the legal profession is important to the Center, “as [it is] unethical conduct that is harmful to the administration of justice and to the public. Bullying can violate several of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct. For example, bullying that can be proven to be based on a protected class violates Rule 8.4(g), which identifies professional misconduct as lawyers who “engage in conduct that the lawyer knows or reasonably should know is harassment or discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status or socioeconomic status in conduct related to the practice of law.”
Read the full article
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/diversity/disabilityrights/news/bullying-in-profession/
