Feeling you are being targeted at work?
Discrimination and bullying can be difficult to tell apart, and such attacks happening in the workplace make it harder to defend yourself or your colleagues while protecting your job.

• The very first step is to keep a casual protocol of what/who/when and screen shots or other hard proof. This will allow you to review the situation away from work, possibly after some days off and to assess if you are indeed being targeted or not.

• If the protocol shows patterns, repetitions, a high frequency of uncomfortable or even hurtful situations; it is time to take things seriously, be very precise with the protocol and keeping proof, and trying to name what happened in each situation.

• Situations could be a joke not suitable for the workplace, a micro aggression, an unwarranted scolding, gaslighting, discrimination (based on sexism, racism, queerphobia, fatphobia, ageism…), a full-on attack, etc.
Often a situation will be seen differently depending on who witnesses it. For example, some people could see a tasteless joke as just that, others as a micro aggression, and others as full on discrimination. Your lived experience, your protected characteristics, the relation to the people creating these situations (do they have official or unofficial hierarchical power or societal privilege over you?) and the frequency of these occurrences will inform how to qualify the situation.

• As you build your case file, check who is an ally, or not, in the workplace, or if you can join a union. Often employees get disappointed by the lack of support or even betrayal of HR, or of colleagues who seemed friendly; use your judgment and caution.
And check who is an ally out of the workplace: a psychologist or lawyer might be best because you do not have to observe privacy laws/GDPR with them and certain aspects of your NDA / Non-Disclosure Agreement if you signed one – keeping in mind whistle-blowers do not have to fully abide by certain aspects of NDAs.
Friends, family, and community circles or NGOs can also be a support system, but beware to respect GDPR and NDAs.
Also know that you may bring an advisor to HR meetings, and you never have to sign any document on the spot.

• At work, try and not put yourself in a situation that could lead to more bullying. You may want to avoid meetings with certain colleagues or work social events. You may not respond to certain messages or parts of messages as if you had not noticed. You may ask colleagues to explain further in written before answering to requests or performing tasks. You may prefer messages to conversations, and may want to send written de-briefs, asking for confirmation to the other party, so oral discussions have a written track. You will want to double check all your work and what you write to make sure you are not the one at fault at any point.

• It might also help grounding yourself and getting perspective to use your sick leave. When being targeted, we often react by working more, hoping our good intentions will solve the situation; or we get destabilised by the abuse or get tired from the over-work, and commit more mistakes – which gives ammo to the bully. Bullying is not about the person being bullied but about the bullies’ misuse of their (perceived) power. Meaning trying to work more may make the situation worse because you open the door to being victimised further. Setting boundaries in a professional manner may help the situation or not, but rarely makes things worse; and it is important in case you go to court, to prove you did try to stop the abuse.

• Analysing the situation, possibly together with your support system folks, try and understand if you are being bullied by an isolated abuser, or if this part of the company culture, ie if this is a systemic issue.
In case it is a personal issue, think whether an open talk or a mediation could solve the situation.
In case it is systemic, a mediation will generally not solve the situation, but it might still be good to attempt anyways and with witnesses, to build your case.

• When all fails, it might be time to decide whether this job is worth the grief, and/or how much money and time you are willing to spend on keeping your job or getting justice.
Some options are to go legal – first with a private conciliation, then possibly in court which could become a public case, to speak up within your company/industry, or to go public on social media or to the press.
In any case, when reporting the situation, always to try and remain as neutral as possible (as if you were your own bot lawyer advocating for a third party if you will), do not directly accuse (try and not name names, act as if to verify facts by asking questions, use expressions such as “it felt as if”, “might have”, “would seem as”…, use passive phrase structures, measure how inflammatory or not your wording should be…) to avoid being accused of defamation or being unjustly seen as the trouble-maker.

• NB: when going legal or public, it will be important to make the distinction between bullying and discrimination to avoid being accused of defamation, and to get the right kind of legal or public attention.
Every interaction is about systems of power and oppression, meaning no abuse is ever free of discriminatory bias. That being said, what is the percentage of their bullying due to your protected characteristics (discrimination) compared to the percentage due to non-protected characteristics (bullying) such as being the latest hire, seeming isolated, not being popular or fun at work, or having done something that displeased that person for no reason you could have known about?
Once you have made your evaluation, you will have a clearer picture of the kind of support you need.