Bullying in the advocacy world

One of the saddest things I have repeatedly encountered in advocacy is bullying.

Being a successful advocate for anything requires a certain level of chutzpah mixed with fear. The fear drives you to the superhuman feats of putting yourself out there, the chutzpah helps you figure out how to be effective.

But, no matter what you do, or how carefully you do it, there will be those who don’t have the necessary chutzpah who resent your achievements. They’ll be jealous that you’re getting the interviews or the public thanks, or just be pissed that you figured out how to do something they didn’t.

So from time to time they behave appallingly. Instead of supporting and celebrating the achievements of our community no matter who got the win or made the step forward, they’ll belittle and undermine.

A favourite tactic is to accuse the individuals doing well of being bullies. They’ll say they were forced out, when they didn’t show up. They’ll say someone is being passive aggressive because they refused to do all the work. They’ll blatantly make up nonsense and conspiracy rather than just say thank you.

The problem for the effective advocate is there is literally no way to defend a charge of bullying. Big organisations can do inquiries and investigate if there’s any truth or it’s just malicious, but it doesn’t matter, the allegation does the damage.

Even when the entire exchange was public, able to be screen shotted and analysed, it doesn’t matter. They’ll just say the individual has a history of being a bully and therefore paint a completely innocuous exchange in a frame that makes look bad – or indeed, in the scenario I’ve been dealing with the last couple of days, make the completely unhinged fiction look believable.

Invariably when one of these sad events happen there’s also a lot of innocent bystanders who get hurt. Those aggrieved complainants will accuse them of also being bullies, or fake accounts for the person under attack, or conspirators. Or just blocked from groups and lists and never told why.

To put it another way, the allegation of bullying is a common bullying tactic to silence and sideline those getting stuff done.

Let me be clear here that I’m not talking about the very serious allegations of systemic bullying in parliament. There’s video upon video of Morrison being a bullying thug. And other members of parliament for that matter. But this of course is part of the problem: when an allegation is ‘trendy’, for want of a better word, there’s a lot of social pressure to just accept the allegation as fact without any investigation of the evidence. We don’t want bullying to go unpunished, but we do need to look at the evidence to see who the real bully is.

Ultimately, the cause we all say we are working for is what gets hurt. Our energy is diverted, our collective and individual reputations tarnished, and the people we need to convince are utterly uninterested in bullshit high school drama so will switch off faster than a blown fuse.

Great job.

Interestingly I had two conversations earlier in the week about how we can get the global migraine community on the same page and end any turf wars or other such nonsense. All the ideas are great in theory, but this weekend has reminded me that first we’ll have to figure out how to get small people with keyboards not to tear their own house down from the inside.

For me, I’ve reached the limit of abuse I am willing to tolerate. The upshot of that is that, effective immediately, I’m no longer advocating for Emgality or Ajovy to be on the PBS (Migraine Australia is, but not me). I’ve made getting our medications my number 1 priority for over two years, have spent literally thousands of dollars travelling to Sydney and Canberra for meetings, running ads for petitions, ordering merch, paying for all kinds of things… and hundreds of hours advocating and lobbying for other people. Aimovig has been off the table since November 2019… so everything I’ve done since then has been pure charity to help others.

Some don’t want me to do that and have actively and repeatedly sought to bully me out of that role. So you win. I’m done. Get them listed yourselves.

If you are tempted to call me in a week and say you’re sorry, this is really hard, please help… I bill at $600 an hour and require a $20k retainer.