Mind Moves:Whistleblowing is a derogatory term for courageous ethical enactment of professional principles by employees who are prepared to call wrongdoing when they see it. It is recognising what is wrong and disclosing it so that it cannot continue. It is identifying the potential casualties or victims of organisational practices that are deceptive, negligent, criminal, unjust or that endanger the health and safety of any person or group.
The etymology of the term whistleblowing lies in the former practice by English "bobbies" on the beat, who, if they happened upon the commission of a crime, blew their whistles to alert their colleagues and the public about it. In so doing they legitimately solicited their assistance. With time, the term transmogrified from this positive practice into one in which the whistleblower is often perceived to be emitting shrill, unnecessary noise that nobody wants to hear.
It is not easy to be a whistleblower; their concerns are often disparaged, ridiculed and generally consigned to the realms of unreality.
Organisational documents may assume Orwellian dimensions: dismissal of truth, internal investigation, selective research and retrospective report rewriting rather than accurate recording of events. Records may obfuscate what actually occurred and FOI requests may be thwarted on the basis of safety, security or public interest.
Whistleblowing may include challenging gross mismanagement, misallocation or waste of funds, abuse of authority, dereliction of duty or danger to public safety. In essence, whistleblowing is saying, "I see it, I name it, I will not participate in it and I will not protect those who perpetrate it."
The context in which whistleblowing occurs will depend on the consequences. The most effective way to stifle whistleblowers is to undermine their observations, dismiss their claims, question their mental stability and deplete their mental resistance so they begin to question their own reality. In this way the backlash on whistleblowers may be vicious. Retaliation may be swift and malicious. This is because organisational toxicity is often insidious, intangible and difficult to substantiate. The collective will to challenge is often diverted into competition between factions who have become fearful of erosion. Divide and conquer prevails.
Because of this, the most likely whistleblowers are those who are new into the organisation, those who believe in professional standards and in personal moral responsibility. These new entrants are most likely to see what has become invisible to others. They are not tainted by time or burdened by organisational history. They are more likely to question present practice and to pursue their issues of concern to conclusion.
They may come into the organisation with a naive belief in its rhetoric, anxious to enact it, unaware that reality does not lie behind it and when they discover poor practice believe that the system will be grateful for their observations and anxious to redress them.
Whistleblowers are usually hardworking, conscientious believers in justice. They follow the appropriate organisational channels of complaint but may find that the organisational elites control appeal and aim to maintain the status quo.
It is then that they must hold their nerve. It is most difficult for whistleblowers when organisational malpractices are endemic, when the culture of inadvertent collusion has become embedded or when there are, implicitly or explicitly, personal or professional penalties for identifying what everyone else is afraid to name.
There may be stories of former colleagues who attempted to challenge what they saw and were conveniently re-located, constructively dismissed, prematurely retired, effectively demoted or otherwise made examples of the futility of repudiation of the established regime. There may be fear that the organisation is more powerful than the individual, a belief that one person cannot make a difference, an ideology that says it's not up to me, a defeatism that says it is beyond my scope, or there may be the hope that somebody else will appear to do battle on behalf of everyone and win.
Organisational negligence erodes confidence, makes employees question their competence, lose their decisiveness and it grinds down their capacity to challenge. Employees may abdicate accountability, renege on their responsibility and benefit by bunkering into invisibility on the basis that if they stay quiet they will not be disturbed.
Additionally, the incidence of burnout when public service systems in particular are unsupported often means that employees become professionally burnt out and thereby lose their idealism, energy, enthusiasm, optimism and sense of purpose and become unconsciously complicit in viewing the consumer in commercial, callous or careless ways.
Guardians of an ethical society, we need whistleblowers. The sequelae of silence is already all too evident in our society as we uncover more and more tragic instances of the consequences of individual cowardice and corporate complicity in corruption.
Constructive internal reporting is an organisational opportunity, not an attack and genuine organisations should welcome it as there is an onus on them to create the conditions that allow people to practice well and allow malpractice to be exposed without reprisal.
Clinical psychologist Marie Murray is director of the Student Counselling Services in University College Dublin. Her most recent book, Living Our Times, is published by Gill and Macmillan.