A desire to “protect the institution” may be intended to preserve trust. When accusations finally become public, the opposite happens.
When complaints of sexual abuse or violence are filed against an employee at a large institution, leaders often instinctually want to protect their organization by hiding the misconduct. It’s immoral to deny justice to survivors and leave offending employees to harm more people.
But there’s another problem: efforts to hide the misconduct will eventually fail, leaving community members to suffer the consequences. When it’s time to pay the settlements, the bill lands not on the officials who slow-walked or outright ignored complaints but on residents and taxpayers, or students, staff and faculty who had no say in the cover-up.
Santa Monica is demonstrating this right now. For years, city staff allegedly ignored warnings about an employee, Eric Uller, who preyed on youths in the Police Activities League between the 1980s and 2000s. The city has now paid over $229 million to settle claims related to Uller’s crimes, according to the Santa Monica Daily News.
In September, the Santa Monica City Council declared the city to be in “fiscal distress,” citing the settlement payouts as a major contributing factor. That $229 million is money that could have paid for improving public infrastructure, making residents safer or helping residents struggling with food insecurity or homelessness. Instead, residents’ tax dollars have been used to pay for the negligence of prior city leaders who are no longer around to take accountability for their inaction.
The University of Southern California offers another local example. Colleagues complained about the inappropriate behavior of student health center gynecologist George Tyndall in the 1990s, according to the Los Angeles Times. Students and health center nurses continued to accuse him of misconduct, yet he wasn’t suspended until 2016.
The result is $1.1 billion in settlements: a civil settlement to 710 sex abuse survivors and a class-action settlement open to anyone who received treatment from Tyndall at the university. Now, USC faces operating deficits that, in addition to major budget cuts, have led to layoffs of 974 employees since July, according to the Morning, Trojan newsletter.
The officials who chose to ignore complaints against Tyndall for years showed a gross lack of concern for the well-being of their female students. But it is also believable that they genuinely thought they were protecting the university by keeping the abuse hidden. In reality, they caused severe cuts to university programs, research and staff.
This is not an argument against compensating survivors; when institutions engage in these behaviors, they have a financial and ethical responsibility to make restitution. It is an argument against the kind of institutional culture that creates these scandals and allows them to thrive.
When abuse allegations are viewed as short-term public relations problems to be quieted rather than moral obligations to resolve the source of the harm, it allows abusers to continue causing damage. And when that damage is finally exposed, the harm to the institution is far greater than if the first complaint had been properly handled.
Though each institution has different structures and needs, accountable leadership will require similar changes: independent reporting lines that don’t answer to the officials under scrutiny, centralized databases where complaints can be tracked, and clear timelines for all complaints to be investigated by third-party committees.
It also requires consequences for leaders who ignore red flags. Clawbacks of bonuses, and performance evaluations that take into account compliance with reporting and investigating requirements as well as reports of retaliation against others who attempt to file complaints or follow policies.
Finally, any large settlement should automatically trigger an independent review of policies and training with a publicly available report of the results. The report should include data about complaints filed, how exposure will be reduced in the coming year, how the settlement will affect budgets and how accountability will be achieved.
City residents, university faculty and students who aren’t the source of these liabilities shouldn’t be forced to finance them. We do have to repair damage caused by negligence of leaders past. But we do not have to continue paying for institutional secrecy and abuse going forward.
- Vanessa Kolb
