Introduction

In the aftermath of workplace harassment, one of the most painful betrayals often doesn’t come from the harasser or management. It comes from peers—colleagues who witnessed the abuse, knew it was wrong, and either stood silently or, worse, turned against the person brave enough to speak up.

This phenomenon isn’t just anecdotal. It is a pattern that law, policy, and institutional reform efforts have yet to acknowledge fully. When victims of harassment come forward, they frequently experience isolation, social ostracism, and even retaliation from the very coworkers they once trusted. These betrayals cut deep, not only because they compound trauma but because they’re often invisible and legally unrecognized.

Psychological research offers critical insight into this behavior. Building on Jennifer Freyd’s Betrayal Trauma Theory and Judith Herman’s work on trauma adaptation, this article explores how the psychological burden of witnessing injustice—especially within systems people depend on—can trigger denial, disengagement, or even antagonism. In essence, trauma spreads.

Yet our legal frameworks—especially retaliation jurisprudence—fail to capture this reality. Title VII protects against formal acts of retaliation by employers but does little to address the subtler forms of workplace punishment inflicted by peers. Until the law evolves to reflect the full ecosystem of institutional betrayal, survivors will continue to suffer in silence, and their colleagues will continue to participate in harm, even if unconsciously.

I. The Psychology of Workplace Betrayal

A. Betrayal Trauma Theory: When Truth Becomes Too Dangerous

Jennifer Freyd’s Betrayal Trauma Theory, developed in her landmark work Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse, explains how individuals who trusted caregivers may unconsciously suppress or remain unaware of that harm to preserve the attachment. She coined the term “betrayal blindness” to describe this psychological defense mechanism—where awareness of abuse is blocked not because the victim is incapable of understanding it but because acknowledging it would threaten the victim’s sense of security and stability. Freyd later extended this theory to institutional settings, where dependency on the organization mirrors the dependency of a child on a caregiver.

This has profound implications for the modern workplace, particularly in environments characterized by rigid hierarchies, cultures of conformity, or authoritative institutional power—such as law enforcement, academia, healthcare, and public agencies. In these settings, coworkers who witness or suspect harassment may unconsciously engage in “adaptive unawareness,” not out of malice but as self-preservation. Recognizing the full scope of harm, especially when it implicates trusted colleagues, senior leadership, or the institution itself, would require confronting a truth threatening their sense of safety or belonging.

Instead, these individuals may rationalize management’s behavior, reframe the victim as unstable or oversensitive, or quietly withdraw. This isn’t simple indifference—it’s a psychological accommodation to a hostile environment that punishes truth-telling. When silence becomes a condition for inclusion, betrayal blindness becomes a workplace survival tactic.

B. Judith Herman’s Trauma Adaptation Model: Survival Through Submission

Where Freyd helps explain why people suppress knowledge of abuse, psychiatrist Judith Herman offers a complementary framework that describes how individuals—especially those exposed to prolonged trauma in coercive environments—adapt by submitting to institutional power. In her foundational work, Trauma and Recovery, Herman describes how survivors often learn to comply with aggressors, minimize their pain, and internalize blame to survive. The same behavioral patterns can be seen in workplace cultures where speaking up is discouraged and retaliation is real.

In these environments, trauma adaptation is not limited to direct victims. Entire teams, departments, and peer networks may absorb the unspoken lessons of silence. Employees understand that challenging a supervisor, raising concerns about harassment, or supporting a colleague who has reported misconduct can lead to marginalization, scrutiny, or reputational harm. Over time, the organization rewards accommodation and punishes resistance, and the trauma becomes collective.

Rather than resisting abuse, the institution metabolizes it—silence becomes the cultural norm, and the absence of open conflict is mistaken for organizational health. What begins as individual survival evolves into structural complicity.

C. Trauma Contagion in the Workplace

When Freyd’s betrayal trauma and Herman’s trauma adaptation intersect in the workplace, what emerges is a form of trauma contagion. The original harm—sexual harassment, discrimination, or retaliation—does not remain isolated to the person who experienced it. It spreads, reshaping social dynamics and infecting the broader organizational culture. Colleagues disengage emotionally from the victim. Loyalty shifts toward institutional authority. Discomfort is redirected into silence, and silence becomes a collective coping strategy.

This psychological reality, however, is largely unrecognized in employment law.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits retaliation against employees who engage in protected activity. Still, the statute’s enforcement mechanisms focus almost exclusively on adverse actions taken by employers. In Burlington Northern & Santa Fe Railway Co. v. White, the Supreme Court broadened the definition of retaliation to include any action that might dissuade a reasonable person from making a complaint. Still, courts remain hesitant to treat peer ostracism, cultural exclusion, and social coercion as materially adverse—despite their chilling effect on speech and their psychological toll.

The Court’s 2024 decision in Muldrow v. City of St. Louis reinforced that even seemingly lateral employment decisions, like a job transfer without a pay cut, may still be actionable if they cause real harm. Yet, Muldrow also exposed the doctrinal limits of retaliation law. While the Court signaled openness to recognizing non-economic injuries, it stopped short of addressing the kinds of diffuse, interpersonal retaliation that often unfold after someone reports misconduct—acts that are no less damaging because they are social rather than formal.

Until the law acknowledges the full spectrum of trauma-informed retaliation—including how peer dynamics and institutional culture reproduce harm—it will continue to offer only partial protection. And in doing so, it will shield individuals who abuse power and the systems that enable them.

II. Witnesses Under Pressure: The Social and Organizational Context

If trauma explains why individuals betray themselves to survive, then organizational culture explains why entire groups betray each other.

In workplaces where power is concentrated, dissent is punished, and loyalty is rewarded, bystanders’ silence is not a moral failure—it’s a predictable behavioral outcome. Whether intentionally or not, institutions shape how employees interpret and respond to misconduct. What begins as an instinct for self-protection becomes codified through practice, policy, and culture.

A. Loyalty to the Institution Over Loyalty to the Truth

For many employees, speaking up against harassment isn’t simply a personal decision—it’s a professional risk calculation. Will I be seen as disloyal? Will I lose access to opportunities? Will I be labeled “difficult,” “unreliable,” or “not a team player”?

In these environments, truth becomes a reputational liability. Coworkers who privately acknowledge harassment may remain publicly neutral—or worse, performatively loyal to the accused or leadership. Their silence isn’t always passive; it can morph into complicity through small, cumulative acts: not inviting the victim to meetings, staying silent when others gossip, or echoing leadership’s justifications for what happened.

This is especially true in hierarchical workplaces like the NYPD, fire departments, hospitals, or universities, where institutional identity often eclipses individual conscience. In such settings, breaking rank—even morally—invites punishment.

B. Policy, Culture, and the Manufactured Risk of Solidarity

Employers promote bystander intervention training, zero-tolerance harassment policies, and whistleblower protections. However, these are often designed to reduce legal exposure rather than to create real cultural change.

HR departments may frame themselves as neutral, but they often serve as agents of risk mitigation. Equal Employment Opportunity units may exist in name only—underfunded, underpowered, and usually beholden to leadership. Even well-meaning Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Programs tend to sidestep discussions about power and retaliation in favor of palatable, non-threatening messages. The result is a compliance culture without emotional or psychological safety.

Witnesses learn quickly—formally and informally—that supporting a victim carries consequences, while staying silent or aligning with institutional power preserves one’s position. What the law calls “retaliation,” many workplaces simply call politics.

Sidebar: Public vs. Private Sector Complicity—Different Tools, Same Silence

While the retaliation mechanisms differ between sectors, the results often look the same: silence, isolation, and cultural compliance.

In the public sector, especially law enforcement or municipal agencies, complicity is enforced through paramilitary hierarchies, civil service protections weaponized against whistleblowers, and loyalty-based advancement systems. Speaking out against misconduct is framed as insubordination, and protections like union grievance processes are often unavailable—or actively used against the complainant.

In the private sector, the tools are more subtle but equally coercive: at-will employment, blackballing, and informal networks that quietly punish those who speak up. Whistleblowers are often branded as “not a fit,” denied mentorship, or excluded from advancement pipelines. Corporate cultures reward likability and brand loyalty over principle, reinforcing a social logic of silence.

Both sectors create a neutral culture, but silence is incentivized beneath the surface, and retaliation is often outsourced to peers who absorb the institution’s expectations and enforce them socially.

C. Group Dynamics and the Contagion of Silence

Social psychology reinforces these patterns. In-group/out-group dynamics, fear of ostracism, and the desire to maintain status lead coworkers to conform to dominant narratives—even when those narratives are unjust.

This is not just about fear. It’s also about identity. As Freyd’s betrayal trauma theory shows, when the workplace becomes a source of identity and belonging, people unconsciously distort or deny information that threatens their connection. Herman observes that individuals in coercive systems adapt to survive by complying with the group.

The group, in turn, adapts to maintain cohesion by othering the whistleblower. What started as abuse by one person becomes the collective reenactment of harm by many.

A striking example of workplace retaliation metastasizing through institutional culture is the case of former NYPD Lieutenant Angelique Olaechea, who was awarded $872,000 by a federal jury in 2021 after proving she was retaliated against for supporting a fellow officer facing discrimination. Olaechea had assisted Officer Javier Velazquez in filing internal EEO complaints and later testified on his behalf at a departmental trial, stating she witnessed discriminatory conduct by two senior officers—Captain Vincent Greany and Lieutenant Daniel Brown. Immediately after her testimony, Olaechea became the target of coordinated retaliation. She was falsely accused of having a romantic relationship with Velazquez, subjected to defamatory rumors among her peers, and abruptly transferred to another precinct after nearly a decade of service in her command. She was also hit with retroactive departmental charges—many minor and unrelated to her job performance—resulting in four guilty findings at trial and, ultimately, a recommendation for her termination. She resigned in 2018.

The jury’s verdict in Olaechea’s favor sent a clear message, but the case also underscores how peer complicity and managerial retaliation often operate in tandem. While the official acts of discipline were carried out through formal channels, the damage began with informal enforcement—ostracism, whisper campaigns, and public discrediting—fueled by coworkers and leadership. It’s a textbook case of trauma contagion: what began as retaliation from supervisors became a socially enforced punishment, replicated by the institution as a whole.

D. The Legal Vacuum Around Peer Retaliation

Title VII and its state and local analogs focus primarily on actions taken by the employer. While decisions like Burlington Northern and Muldrow have broadened what counts as adverse action, they still rely on tangible harm tied to formal authority. This leaves peer-based retaliation—ostracism, social punishment, and character attacks—mainly outside the scope of enforceable protection, even though these dynamics can have a profound chilling effect on workplace accountability.

In practice, employers can outsource retaliation to coworkers without ever lifting a finger. So long as managers maintain plausible deniability, the institution remains legally insulated—even as it benefits from the retaliation carried out by others on its behalf.

III. Peer Retaliation and Social Ostracism

Silence in the face of harassment isn’t just a passive failure of courage—it’s often a form of social conditioning. In many workplaces, especially those structured around hierarchy and authority, the cost of siding with a victim is so high that complicity becomes the norm. Peer retaliation emerges not from formal orders but from unwritten rules: protect the institution, preserve the status quo, and distance yourself from those who challenge it.

A. Groupthink and the Manufactured Consensus

Groupthink thrives in environments where conformity is rewarded and dissent is punished. Employees quickly learn that questioning authority—or aligning with someone who does—is professionally dangerous. As a result, they adopt the dominant narrative, even when it contradicts what they know to be true. The logic is simple and deeply human: If they can do this to her, they can do it to me.

This fear-based reasoning fuels status quo bias, a psychological phenomenon in which people prefer existing power structures not because they are just but because they feel safer and more predictable. In workplace harassment cases, that bias works in favor of aggressors and against those who speak up.

Rather than risk being pulled into the conflict, coworkers look away. They reframe the victim as the problem, question their motives, or dismiss them as “too sensitive.” The social pressure to conform doesn’t need to be verbalized—it’s embedded in every ignored email, every unreturned call, and every vacant chair at the lunch table.

B. The Collapse of Psychological Safety

Psychological safety—the belief that one can speak up or show vulnerability without fear of retribution—is essential for reporting misconduct. However, in hostile workplaces, psychological safety disappears quickly. Leadership sets the tone, but peer behavior reinforces it. Once a complaint is filed, the complainant is often treated as radioactive. Coworkers begin to assess not the claim’s merit but the risk of being associated with the person who made it.

Loyalty to authority becomes rationalized as professionalism. Silence is reframed as neutrality. Meanwhile, the social exclusion deepens, and the message is clear to everyone: This is what happens when you speak up.

In environments like the NYPD, this pattern is amplified by paramilitary culture, chain-of-command obedience, and unwritten rules about loyalty. The Olaechea case is a textbook example—supervisors didn’t just punish her; she was slowly abandoned by the coworkers who had once respected her. The retaliation was bureaucratic but also profoundly social, informal, and communal.

C. Legal Systems Intentionally Don’t Get It

The failure of the retaliation law to recognize peer-enforced punishment isn’t a matter of oversight—it’s a matter of design. The legal system has long drawn clean, convenient lines around what constitutes actionable harm, and peer ostracism doesn’t fit neatly within those boxes. Not because it isn’t harmful, but because acknowledging it would radically expand the employer’s liability zone.

Under Title VII, retaliation protections focus on employer-driven conduct: terminations, demotions, pay cuts, and disciplinary actions. Courts have incrementally broadened this scope—Burlington Northern acknowledged that retaliatory actions need not be job-related. Muldrow affirmed that even lateral moves can be unlawful if they cause real harm. But these cases still stop short of confronting the full scope of socially mediated retaliation—the whisper campaigns, cold shoulders, reputational damage, and relational sabotage that often follow a protected complaint.

Recognizing these harms would force courts to acknowledge the workplace as a social system, not just a bureaucratic one. It would mean accepting that retaliation is often carried out informally by peers, managers, or leadership proxies who never send a memo or file a formal charge but who know exactly how to make someone disappear.

The law isn’t blind to these realities. It’s willfully indifferent to them.

Legal doctrine protects institutional actors while isolating victims by pretending that peer retaliation exists outside employer responsibility. It allows employers to outsource retaliation while maintaining plausible deniability, and the courts have accepted mainly that tradeoff in the name of administrative clarity and judicial restraint.

But clarity has a cost. And too often, that cost is borne by the people retaliation laws were designed to protect.

IV. Peer Retaliation and Social Ostracism

Retaliation isn’t always a demotion or a pink slip. Sometimes, it’s a look that lingers too long. A conversation that stops when you walk into the room. A meeting you’re suddenly not invited to. Or a peer who once had your back is now silent, distant, or worse, suspiciously aligned with your harasser.

These are the tools of peer retaliation: subtle, deniable, and devastating.

A. What Peer Retaliation Looks Like in Practice

Once a complaint is made, the dynamic shifts. Even coworkers who believe the victim may disengage out of fear. Others rush to align themselves with the accused, not necessarily because they support the behavior, but because they want to distance themselves from the perceived risk. It’s not uncommon for a victim to experience:

• Isolation: Invitations disappear. Collaborations stop. The hallway gets quiet.

• Coldness: Emails become terse. Social warmth vanishes. The tone changes—even when the words don’t.

• Gossip and Smear Campaigns: Rumors emerge questioning the complainant’s credibility, stability, or motives.

• Reputational Sabotage: Involves redefining victims as “disruptive,” “overly sensitive,” or “not team players.”

• False Camaraderie with the Accused: Colleagues may publicly demonstrate support for the alleged harasser as a performance of loyalty—or as a signal to management that they aren’t a threat.

These acts aren’t random. They are part of a collective trauma response shaped by fear, loyalty to power, and the institutionalization of silence. In many cases, they are just as damaging as formal retaliation—if not more—because they affect not only the complainant’s work experience but also their sense of self, credibility, and belonging.

B. The Legal System’s Recognition Gap

Despite the real and measurable harm caused by these behaviors, legal frameworks rarely recognize peer retaliation as independently actionable unless it can be directly attributed to the employer or results in a tangible employment consequence.

Title VII prohibits retaliation for engaging in protected activity. However, courts often demand a showing of “material adversity”—a standard still too frequently interpreted in terms of pay, promotion, or position. Social exclusion doesn’t qualify, even when it causes psychological distress, workplace disengagement, or constructive isolation.

The most common form of retaliation—peer social punishment—is often the least protected. A complainant may lose trust, respect, and relationships. They may be functionally pushed out of their job. But unless a paper trail leads back to HR or upper management, they’re often left without legal recourse.

C. The Real Cost of Being Marked

Being the target of peer retaliation isn’t just demoralizing—it’s professionally destabilizing. It alters team dynamics, erodes access to mentorship, and can kill future opportunities in the organization. In professions where advancement depends on subjective assessments—like law enforcement, academia, finance, or government—reputation is everything.

Once marked as disloyal, problematic, or “too emotional,” a complainant often finds that no one wants to work with them, mentor them, or advocate for them. Their value becomes a function of silence, not skill. And that silence isn’t neutral—it’s demanded.

The institution may not terminate them, but it doesn’t have to. The culture will do the job.

V. The Legal Blind Spot in Retaliation Jurisprudence

Despite the evolution of civil rights law, retaliation jurisprudence continues to operate with a blind spot: it focuses on what can be measured on paper, not what unfolds in culture. The law’s insistence on materiality—visible, documentable harm—leaves vast swaths of retaliation unrecognized and unremedied.

A. What the Law Protects—And Ignores

Under Title VII and related anti-retaliation statutes, courts are tasked with determining whether an employee has suffered an “adverse action” for engaging in protected activity. Historically, this meant something concrete: a demotion, a pay cut, a firing, a denied promotion. These are the employer decisions that the courts understand how to measure.

In Burlington, the Supreme Court broadened the standard, holding that retaliatory acts need not be job-related or even employment-based—as long as they would dissuade a reasonable person from making a complaint. This was a significant shift. The court acknowledged that retaliation could be psychological, situational, or reputational.

But courts have been reluctant to apply Burlington’s logic to peer retaliation in practice. Unless the conduct is directed or tolerated by the employer—and unless it results in a material loss—the behavior is often treated as “immaterial,” “interpersonal,” or “nonactionable.” This preserves the employer’s plausible deniability and places the burden back on the complainant to survive both the retaliation and the evidentiary hurdle.

What gets lost in this framework is the relational violence of workplace exclusion. The smear campaigns, the reputational sabotage, the organizational indifference—none of these typically meet the legal threshold for “adverse action,” even though they frequently lead to the complainant’s exit, resignation, or forced withdrawal from career advancement.

B. Courts Miss the Social Reality

What judges often fail to grasp—or perhaps refuse to confront—is that retaliation is rarely executed through formal channels alone. It is enforced culturally, through tone, silence, withdrawal, and rumor. And because these behaviors are social rather than structural, they often fall outside the reach of traditional legal remedies.

Workplace ostracism, for example, is seldom viewed as a standalone retaliatory act. Yet research has consistently shown that social exclusion in the workplace causes more sustained psychological harm than open conflict, leading to higher rates of depression, disengagement, and attrition. The law, however, still treats this as a non-event—something unfortunate but not unlawful.

This disconnect between legal doctrine and lived experience creates a chilling effect that undermines the goal of retaliation protections: ensuring that people can report misconduct without fear. But when the courts ignore the most common forms of post-complaint punishment, they don’t just permit silence—they institutionalize it.

The result is a retaliation framework that continues to privilege employer control over workplace culture while dismissing the mechanisms through which cultures enforce conformity. Until the courts recognize peer retaliation as a central mechanism of institutional power, the law will remain an incomplete shield—protecting only those forms of harm that appear on HR paperwork.

VI. The Case for Legal Reform

If the law is to fulfill its promise of protecting those who speak out, it must evolve to reflect how retaliation works. That means acknowledging that peer retaliation is not just a byproduct of hostile workplaces—it is one of their primary enforcement tools.

The current legal framework under Title VII and its state and local counterparts is ill-equipped to address the reality of post-complaint peer harassment, even though it’s often the deciding factor in whether someone stays or leaves. To close that gap, reform must address the legal definitions, employer obligations, and cultural conditions that enable informal retaliation to flourish.

A. Expand Retaliation Protections to Recognize Peer Harassment Post-Reporting

Retaliation law must explicitly account for social, reputational, and relational forms of harm, especially when they emerge as a direct response to protected activity. This includes post-complaint ostracism, smear campaigns, coordinated coldness, and other soft forms of coercion that often slip through the legal cracks.

Congress and state legislatures should amend existing anti-retaliation provisions to clarify that retaliation need not be formal or employer-initiated as unlawful. The law must shift from focusing on economic loss to a broader understanding of adverse treatment as it functions within team dynamics, culture, and identity-driven workplaces.

Courts should be empowered—and required—to assess retaliation through a trauma-informed, context-sensitive lens, rather than defaulting to bright-line, economic-only thresholds. If a workplace becomes functionally uninhabitable after protected activity, that alone should trigger scrutiny.

B. Require Employers to Track and Intervene in Coworker Retaliation

Just as employers are expected to prevent and remedy harassment by supervisors, they must also be held accountable for allowing coworker-enforced retaliation to take root after a complaint is made. This means moving beyond the “knew or should have known” standard into affirmative obligations.

Employers should be required to:

• Monitor post-complaint behavior within affected teams or units;

• Investigate allegations of social retaliation with the same urgency as formal misconduct;

• Intervene promptly in gossip, ostracism, or exclusion that undermines psychological safety; and

• Implement protective measures that ensure the complainant is not professionally or socially penalized by peers.

HR, legal, and EEO units must be trained to spot peer retaliation patterns, not just formal acts of reprisal. Silence, isolation, and passive-aggressive exclusion are not neutral—they are enforceable signals of institutional disapproval.

C. Train Workplace Culture Disruptors—Not Just Managers

Most corporate training focuses on supervisors: what they can say, when they must report, and how they must act. But workplace culture isn’t created in policy—it’s created in conversation, behavior, and peer response. To change that, employers must invest in cultural allies, not just legal compliance.

That means training bystanders and colleagues to:

• Identify retaliation that operates socially rather than structurally;

• Support colleagues who come forward without fear of stigma;

• Break the chain of silent complicity through active allyship; and

• Disrupt gossip, rumor-spreading, and power signaling in real time.

These aren’t just soft skills—they are legal risk mitigation strategies. The sooner employers recognize that retaliation can be as much a cultural contagion as a policy violation, the sooner they can build compliant and safe workplaces.

VII. Conclusion: When Trauma Spreads, So Should Responsibility

Ending harassment in the workplace is not just about punishing perpetrators. It’s about dismantling the systems that normalize complicity, reward silence, and punish those who speak the truth. It’s about recognizing that retaliation is not always a formal act—it’s a social process. It thrives in environments where trauma is absorbed, mimicked, and multiplied by peers.

When a survivor comes forward, the retaliation rarely stops at management. The institution responds through culture. The tone changes. Invitations vanish. Loyalty realigns. What begins as protection becomes punishment, carried out not by policy but by people.

Yet, the retaliation law remains frozen in an outdated framework that privileges employer control over collective behavior and refuses to see how social harm enforces institutional silence.

If the law is to mean anything, it must reflect the world as it is. That means expanding retaliation protections to include peer-enforced exclusion, requiring employers to actively monitor for social and cultural retaliation post-complaint actively, and creating clear legal standards that make bystander complicity and informal punishment visible and actionable.

Because when trauma spreads, so should responsibility.

Left unaddressed, these failures harm individuals and degrade trust in the very institutions meant to protect equity, safety, and civil rights. A workplace that protects truth-telling must do more than punish bad actors—it must dismantle the culture that silences the truth.