The lights come up at the Orpheum and the audience stays seated. Four people take chairs on the stage beneath the screen. The first speaker acknowledges the weight of the film, the experiences women carry in silence, and the use of defamation law against those who speak. As she speaks, the movement in the auditorium subsides.
The room settles.
We had spent our recreational time inside a devastatingly dark subject. Someone acknowledged that experience before asking us to discuss it. Those words created the conditions for the conversation that followed.
The film was Silenced, Selina Miles’s documentary following human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson as she challenges the use of defamation law to silence survivors and the journalists who report their accounts. The film opened the Sydney Film Festival and reaches Australian cinemas on 3 September 2026.
Regina Featherstone sat on the panel afterwards. Her research turns the film’s subject into a direct governance question.
The room shapes what we hear
Organisations shape the information available to their leaders. Reporting lines, settlement agreements, legal advice, employment decisions and board papers determine which experiences become visible, which are classified as closed, and which patterns reach the board.
Organisations create similar conditions around workplace harm. Policies, reporting lines, settlement agreements, legal advice, employment decisions and board papers shape what travels through the organisation. Together, these systems determine what reaches its leaders.
Each stage involves choices. A manager decides whether to escalate a concern. Human resources determines how the matter is classified. Legal advisers shape the terms of settlement. Executives decide which information enters a board paper and how it is described. By the time directors receive a report, a complex human experience may have become a single number or a closed matter.
Boards hear what their organisations have arranged for them to hear.
The scale of organisational silence
In 2023, Sharmilla Bargon and Regina Featherstone surveyed 145 Australian legal practitioners who handle workplace sexual harassment matters.
Around 75 per cent said every complaint they had resolved involved a strict non-disclosure agreement. This included 69.3 per cent of practitioners acting for victim-survivors and 79.24 per cent acting for respondents, according to Let’s Talk About Confidentiality, published in 2024.
The Australian Human Rights Commission’s Time for Respect survey, published in 2022, found that one in three workers had experienced workplace sexual harassment during the previous five years. Half of the incidents were repeated. Half of those repeated incidents continued for longer than a year. Eighteen per cent were reported.
These figures show how organisational silence is produced. A large share of workplace sexual harassment remains outside formal reporting systems. Many reported matters then end under confidentiality provisions.
In professional practice, I have seen women accept settlements after prolonged workplace harm. The agreement may provide compensation and privacy. It can also shape their employment options, financial security and ability to describe what happened. The organisation closes the matter at case level while the woman continues to carry the experience.
The word resolution can cover several different outcomes. A legal file may close while the person continues to live with the professional, financial and psychological consequences. The manager involved may remain in place. The team may receive no explanation. Colleagues may draw their own conclusions from the departure of the person who raised the concern.
A low complaint number can then arrive in a board paper and appear reassuring. The system has contained the experience before the board has had the opportunity to understand it.
When individual agreements create a pattern
Each settlement carries its own circumstances. A victim-survivor may value privacy, certainty and an end to a prolonged legal process. Confidentiality may be her informed choice. That choice deserves protection.
The governance question sits at the collective level. When agreements accumulate, they create an organisational pattern. Repeated settlements linked to one manager, executive, team or business unit contain information that belongs within board oversight.
Paul Nesbit and I described a related dynamic as collusion with denial in 2015. We examined leadership development programmes evaluated through comfortable indicators that produced limited evidence of behavioural change. Providers and purchasers both benefited from the established approach. Aligned incentives sustained the pattern.
Workplace settlement processes can sustain collusion with denial when familiar legal terms, individual case management and limited aggregate reporting combine. The organisation receives closure at case level while directors receive an incomplete account of conduct risk.
This pattern can develop through ordinary professional practices. Each participant attends to the immediate matter and fulfils a recognised function. Governance requires someone to examine the accumulated effect. Aggregate analysis turns a series of closed cases into information about culture, conduct and organisational risk.
Safety is collective
The proposition I take from Silenced feels strong.
No one is safe until we are all safe.
Safety is realised collectively. It reaches an organisation when every person can raise a concern, receive meaningful support and see fair employment outcomes.
Organisational safety is collective. When one person experiences harm and carries the consequences in silence, the underlying conditions remain active. Colleagues learn from what happens to those who speak. They see who leaves, who advances, whose account is treated as credible and where the organisation places its protection.
Those observations shape future behaviour. Employees decide whether to raise a concern, use a reporting channel, support a colleague or remain silent. Formal policies gain meaning through these visible employment outcomes.
The employment outcomes following a complaint therefore belong within the board’s field of attention. Boards can examine what happened during the following twelve months:
- Did the person remain employed?
- Did their role, team or reporting line change?
- What happened to their performance assessment and career progression?
- What support did they receive?
- What employment outcome followed for the subject of the complaint?
This information reveals how formal policy operates in lived experience.
Confidentiality with governance
Careful governance can protect individual privacy and make organisational patterns visible.
Boards can request aggregate reporting on workplace misconduct settlements across several years. That reporting can include the number of agreements, the use of confidentiality provisions, recurring teams or individuals, common themes and subsequent employment outcomes.
Directors can also ask who controls the categories used in that reporting. Matters described as interpersonal conflict, performance management, negotiated exits or grievances may contain conduct concerns that deserve examination. Consistent classification helps the board see connections across cases and reporting periods.
Complaint data also needs context. Employee surveys, exit information, absenteeism, turnover by team, internal movements and settlement patterns give directors a fuller account of cultural health. A quiet report becomes a prompt for inquiry.
Attention is a scarce organisational resource. What a board chooses to examine is a defining act of chairship.
Three questions belong on a board agenda this quarter:
- What patterns appear across settlements when they are examined in aggregate?
- What happened to the people who raised concerns?
- What does a quiet report allow us to measure?
The board or people and culture committee can request this analysis quarterly, supported by annual trend reporting across business units. The chair can ensure that recurring themes, employment outcomes and settlement patterns receive protected time on the agenda.
The answers will tell a chair how the room has been built, and whose experiences the board is currently able to hear.
The attentive conditions created at the Orpheum offer a practical starting point: acknowledge the weight of the experience, settle the room and listen to what people have carried into it.
Grateful for this film and the hope it carries. Progress will continue as long as we work for it.
Reference: Miles, S. (Director). (2026). Silenced [Film]. Stranger Than Fiction; Sharmill Films.
