ABOUT
Until Everyone Is Safe
Mission: Transforming housing into safe, peaceful, and joyful community.
The Stop Bullying Coalition
The Stop Bullying Coalition is a peer driven grassroots coalition of tenants, citizens, and organizations within the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. We advocate for the rights of all tenants, especially the poor, the elderly, and the disabled and for the universal right to shelter. Since no one is coming to help us, we help ourselves.
Advocacy is the art of creating possibility.
We do advocacy, research, and education to empower tenants. We seek to stop bullying, to understand the social factors that enable or inhibit bullying, to discover ways to build healthy community life, and to overcome the cultural and social issues leading to conflict among tenants of public/subsidized housing.
We fight for our rights by actively engaging in advocacy for legislative and policy remedies; exposing injustices and sharing our success by telling our stories; partnering with coalitions and agencies based on shared interests; empowering individuals to lead in all aspects of our work including education and training opportunities; and offering support and belonging for those we serve and represent.
Legislative advocacy
We advocate for legislation to establish an office of the tenant advocate for oversight and accountability over housing providers, and thus to eliminate bullying, mobbing, and hostile environment harassment.
Bullying
Bullying, mobbing, and harassment harm the target and the whole residential community.
Bullying is any mode of communication to hurt and demean the target or victim. It is aggression and an effort to control that is used to make the target or victim do, or not do, the bidding of the perpetrator.
Mobbing is bullying by a group; it is much more harmful than bullying and when it impacts the whole community it becomes very challenging to overcome.
"[Mobbing] affects our sense of belonging, our self-esteem or sense of self worth, our sense of control over our lives, and our sense of having a meaningful existence."—Janice Harper, PhD, Bullying and Mobbing in Group Settings, statement presented to the Massachusetts Commission on Bullying, 7 August 2017.
Other experts on mobbing say that
“Mobbing is a much more sophisticated way of doing someone in than murder....”—Maureen Duffy and Len Sperry
Landlord responsibility: hostile environment harassment
If we are to solve the problem of bullying, we can’t just blame tenants, because the law makes the landlord responsible for preventing harassment and assuring peaceful enjoyment. In public housing, the Board of Commissioners of the local housing authority is the landlord.
Bullying is a symptom of ineffective or incompetent leadership and failed oversight, a systemic problem that can infect closed and semi-closed institutions. When bullying and mobbing rule, everyone experiences hostile environment harassment—unwelcome conduct creating a situation that makes it difficult or impossible for victims to have the peaceful enjoyment of their residency.
When the landlord fails to do proper oversight and supervise the staff to prevent and remedy bullying, or even promotes and uses bullying as a tactic for control, tenants have no protection and can find no remedy.
The Fair Housing Act identifies hostile environment harassment as unlawful. The Office of the Attorney General of the Commonwealth advises that failure to assure peaceful enjoyment for all tenants and failing to prevent harassment of tenants is unlawful.
A tenant advocate is needed to respond to tenants and provide oversight and accountability to assure that the landlord does their job.
Once the aggressive behaviors of harassment, mobbing, and bullying are eliminated, people are free from fear and able to build a healthy community life. One example is seen at the Northampton Housing Authority.
Impact of our work
We have for over a decade reported on the destructive impact of bullying, mobbing, and harassment on individuals and on community life in The Newsletter of the Stop Bullying Coalition and at StopBullyingCoalition.org .
The survey research we did for the Commission on Bullying revealed that almost half of the respondents experienced bullying in their community and that few people who have been bullied, mobbed, or harassed get relief.
We have mobilized tenants and our coalition partners to testify before hearings of the General Court of the Commonwealth. We have written bills and partnered with legislators to advance them. We have made our case clearly with testimony that sometimes evoked tears, yet after years of advocacy, we are still waiting for relief. We wrote the legislation that led to the creation of the Commission on Bullying, and we represented tenants on that Commission in 2017. The resolve that created the Commission stated
“This research shall be used to identify and develop best practices; raise public awareness; and propose public policy recommendations and legislation necessary to protect tenants from harm and preserve their rights.”—Resolve
When we sought to present our hard-won understanding of the community dynamics of mobbing in a minority report of the Commission, we were unreasonably denied and told by the Chair of the Commission,
“We don’t want you to advocate for tenants.”
The official report of the Commission forms the basis for a bill to provide guidelines and resources to support the management of housing authorities. That legislation would create valuable help and support for those local housing authorities of good will. However, it has no oversight mechanism and would be unlikely to impact on bullying, mobbing, and harassment if the landlord/housing authority did not support the goal of eliminating bullying.
We hold that the office of the tenant advocate is a necessary complement to the guidelines and resources proposal and essential to assure safety and justice for tenants.
Special thanks to all who helped to develop the new "About" including Heidi Sousse, and to the many who have worked with us to seek justice.