A culture of cruelty I’ve learned, living in a society that enables rampant child abuse, that I’m definitely comfortable with being an outlier. Other whistleblowers talk about being ousted for speaking up about child abuse. Elizabeth Svoboda interviewed gold-medal gymnast Dominique Moceanu about how top coaches “belittled”, “harangued,” and “encouraged” athletes to “train while injured.” Svoboda was…
Our society normalizes abuse When the tragedy of 9 / 11 happened, my brother was living in Brooklyn. Roofers were working on his brownstone so after the first plane hit and the world went into panic, he went up to watch with them what was unfolding on the other side of New York city. When…
One of the lessons I learned on the path of being an unlikely whistleblower was that my crime of “committing the truth” would be judged harshly while those in the wrong, either perpetrators of abuse or those enabling them, would receive hearty applause for their puppet show. When I say puppet show, what I mean…
If a coach is successful and wins championships, does it excuse bullying conduct? The best way to answer this question is to ask it first about kids: if reports come in from multiple sources that a child is bullying and hurting others, should a school principal factor in whether or not the child won…
In 2019, I was asked by students at Langara College in Vancouver BC to do a TEDx Talk on the work I was doing and this is what led to my presentation on the “Neuroscience of Bullying.” I was reading neuroscientific, neurobiological, medical, and psychological research about bullying and abuse in order to write my next book.…
I Transformed from a Bystander into an Advocate Whistleblower Series #1 I transformed from an unwilling bystander to someone who is a vocal advocate, researcher, consultant and writer about child abuse and the system that enables it. This is my former life that I had to give up when I spoke up. From the…
Hopefully you’ve seen the film Spotlight about relentless journalists exposing rampant child abuse in the Catholic Churches of Boston. My key take-away from the film is that being a whistleblower requires a lot of grit and commitment. If you want to make actual change, whistleblowers have to stay the course. People say “it takes a village to…
Kyle Beach is a brilliant example of how being a whistleblower is not self-sacrifice, but self-determination. If you haven’t been following the story, this is a picture of Kyle Beach who yesterday moved from abuse victim into the whistleblower role as covered on TSN. I told you at the start, I decided to write this blog…
The village that a whistleblower needs is not only others who report abuse – and at my son’s school there were at least 12 to 14 students in that one year alone, along with their infuriated and vocal parents. In the whistleblower crisis at Amazon, there were only two courageous employees. Emily Cunningham and Maren…
Whistleblowers are afraid because those you expose attack what you care about. While whistleblowers are often praised after the fact for being courageous, few talk about how frightening it is to take this role. Dorothy Suskind writes that “whistleblowers place themselves in the path of an oncoming train in an effort to force a reckoning.”…