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   -= harassment at work -=   
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   Once I stopped watching television and listening to the radio at the end of   
   1990, "they" had to find other ways of committing abuses. So they took what   
   must be for them a tried and tested route; they get at you by subversion of   
   those around you. Since they wouldn't be able to do that with my family or   
   friends, that meant getting at people in the workplace to be their   
   mouthpieces and do their dirty work for them.   
      
   They supplied my employers in Oxford with details from what was going on in   
   my private life, and what I and other people had said at my home and   
   accommodation in Oxford. So people at work repeated verbatim words which   
   had been said in my home, and repeated what I'd been doing recently. Often   
   the most trivial things, the ones from your domestic life, are the ones   
   which hurt most. One manager in particular at Oxford continuously abused me   
   for ten months with verbal sexual abuse, swearing, and threats to terminate   
   my employment. After ten months I was forced to seek psychiatric help and   
   start taking medication, and was away from work for two months. I spoke   
   later with a solicitor about what had happened at that company; he advised   
   it was only possible to take action if you had left the company as a result   
   of harassment, and such an action would have to be started very soon after   
   leaving.   
      
   Over a year later the same manager picked on another new worker, with even   
   more serious results; that employee tried to commit suicide with an   
   overdose as a result of the ill-treatment, and was forced to leave his job.   
   But he didn't take action against the company, either. Abuse at work is   
   comparable to that elsewhere in that tangible evidence is difficult to   
   produce, and the abusers will always have their denials ready when   
   challenged. And even if a court accepts what you say happened, it still   
   remains to prove that abuse causes the type of breakdown I had at the end   
   of 1992. In a recent case before a British court, a former member of the   
   Army brought a case against others who had maltreated him ten years   
   previously. Although the court accepted that abuse had occurred, it did not   
   agree that depressive illness necessarily followed, and denied justice to   
   the plaintiff.   
      
   340   
      
      
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    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)