What is victimisation ?
Victimisation occurs when you are badly or subjected to a detriment because you have made a complaint about discrimination related to one of the protected characteristics.
It is also victimisation if you have supported someone else who has made a complaint and you are subjected a detriment for doing so. This extra legal protection is in place because it is recognised that may be worried about complaining, or supporting someone else that feels they have been discriminated against.
What’s meant by having suffered a detriment ?
Detriment means you have been subjected to some sort of disadvantage.
Example
You make a complaint of sex discrimination against your employer. As a result, you’re denied a promotion. This is victimisation and you can take action against your employer under the Equality Act. Your detriment is you did not get your promotion.
In a nutshell, it is unlawful for someone to treat you badly because you do something about unlawful discrimination or because they think you have done or may do something about unlawful discrimination.
Bullying
Bullying can be defined as offensive, intimidating, malicious or insulting behaviour, an abuse of misuse of power that undermines, humiliates, denigrates or injures the recipient (emotionally or physically), perhaps this can be seen as very similar to harassment.
However, bullying is not included in the Equality Act so is not related to a protected characteristic.
That said, the absence of bullying from the statute books does not mean you have no protection from bullying.
Neither does it mean that bullies can get away with bullying you so long as their behaviour is not concerning a protected characteristic.
All employers have a ‘duty of care’ for their employees, so if you are being bullied we suggest you firstly raise a grievance with your employer about the person bullying you. If they fail to deal with the problem then you could resign and make a claim for constructive dismissal.
Whilst resigning may well remove the bully from your life you will be out of work so before taking such drastic action come and take advantage of a free half hour assessment of your case.
