"If evil people unite to do evil, then all the more should good people unite to do good. If the strength of bad people is that they are together, then good people must do the same to become a force." Leo Tolstoy.
This was a weekend event, not a workday obligation.
It was a moment of remembrance, community, and moral witness.
For more than two decades, since 2001, this campus had been a place where I felt safe to work, to serve, to belong. The Rwandan community are my friends. The campus ministry was going to be present. Under ordinary circumstances, this would have been a place of pastoral care and collective dignity.
But by late May 2021, nothing about my circumstances was ordinary.
By then, I was too traumatised and too unsafe to step foot on public university grounds alone.
When Support Becomes a Barrier
Because I feared further interception, obstruction, or misuse of my communications, I could not safely contact campus ministry myself. My emails had already been blocked. My attempts to seek pastoral care—care that exists precisely for moments like this—had been treated as threats rather than cries for help.
So I asked a trusted friend to act on my behalf.
This was about immediate emotional safety.
My friend had already encountered hostility when she contacted the WHS manager to raise concerns about their legal obligations. Despite this, she agreed to call again—this time to the Dean of the Strathfield campus, someone I had respectfully served, supported, and worked alongside for many years. I had supported her academic work, her teaching, her research, her professional aspirations. This was not a stranger.
A Dean of Campus holds WHS responsibilities.
That duty does not disappear when a worker becomes inconvenient.
On 27 May 2021, my friend called. She introduced herself. She explained she was calling about me—because I needed reassurance that I would be supported if I attended the commemoration.
The response was silence.
When my friend said, “you do know her,” the reply came slowly: “yes.”
When she said, “I just need to talk about Vicki,” she was cut off.
“No, thank you. Goodbye.”
She tried again.
“This is very important.”
“No, thank you. Goodbye.”
The call was placed on hold and then terminated.
No conversation.
No inquiry.
No duty of care.
Immediately after the call was terminated, my friend received a call back from a private number.
There were three separate attempts to call her.
She did not answer.
No voicemail was left.
This detail matters, because it did not occur in isolation.
By this point, my communications had already been blocked. Third parties attempting to raise WHS concerns on my behalf had already been met with hostility. The sudden appearance of a concealed number, immediately following a refusal to engage, formed part of what would become a repeated pattern of behaviour.
We both suspected who it was likely to be.
At the time, the national manager of employment relations and safety knew—or ought reasonably to have known—that what was occurring was reckless, unlawful, and placing me at serious risk of harm. The use of a hidden number, rather than transparent and documented communication, only intensified the sense of coercive control and intimidation already surrounding my attempts to seek safety and support.
The Immediate Physical Consequence
When my friend told me what had happened, my body reacted before my mind could catch up.
The shock triggered a sudden and severe spike in blood pressure.
I suffered a nosebleed.
I began hyperventilating.
Blood pooled in my throat and I started choking.
I am medicated for hypertension because of prolonged stress caused by workplace harm. This was not an abstract reaction. It was acute physiological collapse.
My friend stayed on the phone, trying to keep me conscious and calm. She very nearly called an ambulance.
Had she done so, she would have been forced to expose herself to serious health risks at the height of COVID—despite living with a white blood cell disorder and other conditions that made such exposure dangerous.
This is how far the harm had spread.
The university’s failure to meet its WHS obligations did not only endanger me.
It began endangering those trying to keep me alive.
“I’m Dying”
The next morning, I wrote an email to a friend and colleague I did not want to write.
Everything that follows was written in real time—not as reflection or rhetoric, but as documentation of what my body and mind were enduring after the shock of the night before.
“I got a severe nose bleed from the shock and nearly choked on blood last night… Everyone’s silence and incivility is killing me.”
But that was only part of what I documented at the time. In the same period, I described the broader psychological reality of what was being inflicted:
“This psychological thriller has been more surreal than my dad’s sudden shock of suicide. As we say, ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.’ And I add that university staff have become experts at doing nothing.
Worse than government departments.
What did I ever do to become such a threat to this individual? I suspect the answer is I didn’t die or go away destroyed. But the staff bystanders are now succeeding. I assume it’s because if someone agrees to have a cuppa and I tell them what I’ve been put through, it might cause compassion and empathy and support for weeding out the toxic behaviour, and making it a university with integrity again.
So the goal is that I (Vicki) must die. Well everyone ignoring my plea for support will do that. But no one can disagree that I haven’t fought, on my own, to the very end. But everyone doing nothing—no duty of care and support—it’s the staff, who could’ve been in my shoes, that will succeed in the executive goal of negligence and serious offences to destroy me.”
These were contemporaneous descriptions of lived reality under coercive control, mobbing, and institutional abandonment.
At the time, the national manager responsible for employment relations and safety was actively engaged in conduct that escalated harm rather than preventing it. The Vice-Chancellor, as the senior officer with ultimate WHS accountability, authorised a system that allowed this to continue unchecked.
This was not an isolated failure.
It was a culture.
What This Says About Governance
A public university has non-delegable WHS obligations.
Pastoral care does not require permission.
Human dignity is not conditional on compliance.
Yet in this moment—when I was trying to attend a genocide commemoration with support—I was treated as a problem to be shut down, silenced, and ignored.
The result was medical crisis.
The result was terror.
The result was the near-involvement of emergency services.
This is what reckless endangerment looks like in practice.
Not dramatic language.
Not hindsight embellishment.
But documented harm, contemporaneously recorded, witnessed, and survived.
Why I Am Writing This Now
I am sharing this because formal processes did not stop the harm.
I am sharing this because silence nearly killed me.
I am sharing this because WHS failures do not stay contained—they radiate outward, endangering families, friends, and communities.
And I am sharing this because remembrance events are meant to affirm our shared humanity—not become the setting where institutional cruelty is most starkly revealed.
No one should have to choose between dignity and survival.
———
If this brings up anything heavy for you, please pause, breathe, and take care of yourself—dignity includes care for your own nervous system.
Source: contemporaneous record of events - Document 172.
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| No Duty of Care |
Further reading
Brown, M.E. and Mitchell, M.S. (2010). ‘Ethical and Unethical Leadership: Exploring New Avenues for Future Research.’ Business Ethics Quarterly. 20(4):583-616. DOI:10.5840/beq201020439
[Online approved OA version]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/298852866_Ethical_and_Unethical_Leadership_Exploring_New_Avenues_for_Future_Research
Duffy, C. (2025, 19 September). ‘Senate inquiry calls for cap to vice chancellor pay as chair lashes 'rotten culture' hurting university staff and students.’ ABC News. [Online]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-19/senate-inquiry-interim-report-university-governance/105795694
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