February 17, 2012 – Sexual harassment, racial discrimination, an uncivilized workplace. As far as Chicago police officer Karen Wojcikowski is concerned, they are all forms of bullying.

Wojcikowski, one of two officers assigned to the police beat that includes Marina City, is also founder of a nonprofit organization that advocates for bullied children. “The Bully Police Squad” was started in 2010 to increase public awareness and help children, parents, and teachers affected by bullying and social cruelty.

But adults are not immune. 35 percent of workers in the United States, according to a 2010 poll by the Workplace Bullying Institute, report being victims of bullies. It can start with stress, workers calling in sick, being less productive. It can turn violent.

“You’ve seen people, they ‘go postal’ and all of sudden they’re going to kill somebody in the workplace,” says Wojcikowski (left). “A lot of these people feel isolated, that there’s no one to help them. These bosses belittle their employees so much that their level of self-esteem goes down.” A statistic that may be surprising is that 75 percent of these bullies are women. According to Wojcikowski, female bullies tend to victimize both men and women.

Wojcikowski – you may call her “Wojo” – says The Bully Police Squad is starting to get inquiries from companies looking for programs that address workplace bullying, a problem that she says “has gotten out of hand.”

She spends much of her time traveling, speaking nationwide, educating school administrators, teachers, lawmakers, parents, and children about bullying and its consequences later in life.

“Could you imagine a child that was bullied all his life, then goes to work as an adult…and finds an adult boss that’s a bully?”

Confront and report, advises bully expert

Her advice for someone being bullied at work is to confront the bully, “sooner, not later,” and report bad behavior, either to his or her company’s human resources department or a supervisor.

“If someone says to you ‘shut up’ or they call you an idiot, you’re not an idiot. You need to file a complaint. You need to put the offender in his place. Once they do that, and you take control of the situation, then the whole demeanor will soften. You’ll get to a point where the pattern changes.”

Managers need to screen for bullies when hiring and recognize bullying when it happens. Human resources departments need to communicate with employees, warns Wojcikowski, “because something can happen…where someone has had enough and they take it into their own hands and they end up being violent.”

Wojcikowski and other advocates are working to get laws passed that address bullying, and then get schools to obey the laws. “We’re finding a lot of times where these schools are breaking the laws that are mandated by their government.”

Some financial help will come next month from a theater in the Lake View neighborhood north of downtown Chicago. At an upcoming play, The Fine Print Theatre Company is accepting donations on behalf of The Bully Police Squad. The Xylophone West is about a boy in rural Nebraska, according to the theater’s website, “plotting a flight west to escape an increasingly hostile gang of boys at his high school.”

The play will run March 16 through April 4 at Red Tape Theatre, located at 621 West Belmont Avenue.