Professor Caroline Taylor, who was bullied out of her role at the CFA where she was inquiring into bullying. Credit:Simon Schluter It was May 2016 and with the backing of then-CFA chief executive Lucinda Nolan, Taylor was optimistic that the agency responsible for fighting fires across country and city-fringe Victoria was ready to confront what appeared to be an open secret – that the CFA and its firefighting cousin, the Metropolitan Fire Brigade, were riddled with bad behaviour. But Taylor's optimism turned out to be misplaced. A month after she started work on the survey, Lucinda Nolan resigned under pressure from firefighting's old guard, including its union, as she attempted negotiate a new Enterprise Bargaining Agreement. Taylor pressed ahead, and in June last year produced an interim report drawn from "hundreds and hundreds of narratives".

Former CFA chief Lucinda Nolan. Describing these as "visceral" reading, she was shocked by what she described as "the level of sheer aggression and disrespect" towards staff. The accounts included "several disclosures of sexual assault by operational staff against females", and several who were "driven almost to suicide by bullying and harassment". Former emergency services minister Jane Garrett Credit:Jason South But this was a message the new CFA hierarchy did not want to hear. Taylor says the report was buried – a claim denied by current chief executive Frances Diver.

Then, in the ultimate irony, Taylor herself became a target of bullying. Premier Daniel Andrews backs a new enterprise bargaining agreement sought by United Firefighters Union boss Peter Marshall. Credit:Chris Hopkins "I was intimidated and threatened about my own role and own wellbeing," she told Fairfax Media. "[I] was also told if I ever reported to anybody about the treatment of myself and what was done to me there, that CFA had long arms and CFA knew how to play dirty." UFU secretary Peter Marshall. Credit:Justin McManus

In June, after year spent trying to get CFA top brass to respond to her report, Taylor went on stress leave. She remains a CFA employee, but has been told she is not welcome back. Now, for the first time, she is speaking publicly about her experience. --- Taylor's fledgling CFA career began with promise. She was appointed in late 2015 as a senior advisor on "gender, diversity and inclusion" under the new broom leadership of former senior policewoman Lucinda Nolan.

Jane Garrett still had her job, and the Andrews government had commissioned Victoria's Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission to conduct a major inquiry into the CFA and MFB. Over at Nolan's old workplace, Victoria Police, the human rights commission had just released a damning report into sexual harassment. Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton and the police union had expressed full support for the inquiry and full commitment to embracing change. Hopes were high that the state's fire services and firefighters' union would respond likewise. Taylor, who designed her work to run parallel with that of the commission, was equally optimistic. Taylor had previously worked closely with police in Australia and overseas. Queensland Police Inspector Jon Rouse described her as one of the few academics respected by operational police, who had repeatedly sought her expertise on sexual violence. "It is rare for an academic to possess and demonstrate, through their academic work and police education, such a nuanced understanding of police work," he wrote in 2013, "and this strength is a major reason for the credibility and standing afforded Caroline among police practitioners".

Taylor was used to hearing stories of abuse, but when the responses to the staff survey she designed for the CFA's professional, technical and administrative workers started coming in, she was shocked. Over 500 CFA staff responded, more than half of those eligible, many in depth. The vast majority reported a culture of bullying, fear and silence. "People recounted stories of sexual harassment including being touched, exposed to lewd suggestions, comments, sexually explicit names, derogatory names that were assigned to women in the organisation, women being indecently touched, assaulted and even raped," she says. "A number of staff said they had sought to report these and were shocked and distraught to find there was either no help forthcoming or they were intimidated or threatened for seeking to make that report." "People at CFA in their hundreds trusted myself and Lucinda and the survey, they trusted us with the most honest and detailed experiences that included criminal sexual assaults, and sexual harassment, and physical violence and bullying and intimidation.

"Reading this material was very distressing but I knew and hoped it would be a basis to launch a process of change and deep engagement at a very serious level." It was her belief that the organisation must act. Then the setbacks began. A new enterprise bargaining agreement sought by United Firefighters Union boss Peter Marshall was unexpectedly backed by Daniel Andrews in a deal that perplexed many of his colleagues, and became an incendiary political issue. Garrett resigned as minister. Stories soon emerged that, during negotiations, Marshall had threatened to put an axe through her head – a claim he denies along with allegations his union has any role in perpetuating bullying or harassment.

Then, on June 17, 2016, Nolan also resigned. The CFA board was sacked shortly afterwards after it too refused to endorse the enterprise agreement. Taylor was shaken by Nolan's departure, but remained committed to pushing for change. "Like many others I feel bereft by your resignation but I know that some are now more determined than ever [to push for change]," she told her departing boss. Other senior officers quit the CFA and MFB, including MFB chief fire officer Peter Rau, whose wife blamed "stress as a result of bullying by the UFU and the current situation with the EBA [enterprise bargaining agreement]." Taylor says many CFA staff believe the union is part of the problem and that Andrews' support for it is inexplicable.

"Many female staff, firefighters and non firefighting staff, relayed experiences to me ... of reporting sexual assaults and receiving phone calls from people connected with the union, threatening them directly about things that would be done to them if they went any further with their report. "These women were absolutely terrified." In July, as Taylor refined her confidential report on the staff survey, the human rights commission requested the CFA hand it over. Its findings were explosive. "Literally hundreds and hundreds of respondents gave detail of behaviours that included criminal sexual assault; sexual harassment; physical altercations; bullying; intimidation; harassment; threats of violence and other forms of inappropriate behaviour causing various degrees of distress," the Taylor report states.

"Several respondents identified that they had contemplated suicide; others who had to seek psychiatric and medical intervention to support levels of stress, depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation as a result of serious workplace conduct directed towards them. "Many other respondents wrote of needing to take medical leave as a direct consequence of bullying and harassment as well as requesting to be moved away from the department, locale or even district where they were working as a means of avoiding ongoing bullying and harassment." After the human rights commission was given her report, Taylor says she was warned by multiple staff that her work had annoyed powerful figures inside the fire services. Taylor was told one of them was Nolan's replacement, acting CEO Frances Diver.

In response to the release by Fairfax Media of Taylor's survey and report on Tuesday, Diver said it was 18 months old, and had been conducted "in the heat of the moment in terms of the dispute at the CFA". She had already "acted on the findings in the report and we've implemented a range of actions within CFA", she said. "The important thing, I think, about the response to the survey is that CFA management take this seriously. CFA management and the board are the ones that set the culture in the organisation; it's our responsibility. We think we've got a problem, we know we've got a problem and we're acting on that problem." In bulletin sent to all CFA members late Tuesday, Diver blamed her predecessors: "This cultural problem is a legacy of inaction by former management." Shortly after her appointment to the job, in early August 2016, Diver, a former senior health bureaucrat hand-picked by Andrews, emailed Taylor saying she had "a number of questions/concerns regarding the governance and design of the work you have commenced".

Diver also requested that Taylor give her access to the raw, anonymised staff survey responses. "I thought it may be useful for me to see the raw data (de-identified) so I could get a feel for the cultural issues you have summarised," Diver wrote on August 12, 2016. "This is data I understand that is owned by CFA and we are able to now use it for improvement purposes ensuring appropriate validation and confidentially is maintained." Taylor was immediately concerned. She had made promises of anonymity, and worried that others in the organisation could use the data to "hunt people down". "I certainly would not allow that. I had an ethical, legal and moral obligation to ensure people could not be identified."

Taylor told Diver she would not hand it over. Over the next few months, Taylor was told by several colleagues that she was no longer welcome at the CFA. Her health suffered from increasing levels of stress. Still, as best she could, Taylor pushed for the CFA to engage with her report and to release the findings to staff, something she says senior executives failed to do. "I have to say, I wish CFA Board and OLT [organisation leadership team] would read this report so that they could get a grasp on the key themes from this very important data," she wrote to a senior colleague in the weeks before Christmas 2016. "I cannot overstate the distress of many staff about the organisational silence and lack of communication about the survey." "I am very saddened and frustrated the executive staff in this organisation have not shown any interest to read and understand this important data… I feel [survey respondents] have been treated with contempt."

In the new year, Taylor tried again. But she says some in the organisation appeared more focussed on managing fall-out from the human rights commission inquiry than implementing lasting reform. Correspondence seen by Fairfax Media reveals efforts inside the CFA to cushion the landing resulting from the human rights commission report. The firefighting authority hired a communications expert and strategised over how damaging the findings would be, and whether the CFA needed to acknowledge the fact the agency wouldn't change in the absence of searing public scrutiny. The union played its part in keeping the human rights commission's report from the public eye. It challenged its release in the Victorian Supreme Court, claiming it was a biased stitch-up. Union secretary Peter Marshall claimed the data was not secure and could have allowed people to respond multiple times.

On the broader point of harassment and bullying, the union highlights the lack of any adverse finding against it by a court or tribunal when it comes to the treatment of CFA staff. On October 12, the human rights commission wrote to Taylor, confirming the ongoing delay in the report's release due to legal action. The email acknowledged to Taylor that "your contributions have proven invaluable to the work" of the commission. A year after Andrews' intervention in industrial negotiations, the enterprise agreement remains unsigned, the human rights commission's report has been blocked by Marshall and the union in court, and legislation to reform the fire services has stalled. From Taylor's point of view, the Premier has applied "a Band-Aid" to the culture of an organisation that needed instead to be "completely [blown] open".

She says she is done waiting for the court battle to finish. "In speaking out, I don't seek to bring anybody down. I'm trying to raise something up. "I'm trying to honour the 500-plus staff who completed the survey and who with dignity and probity and trust gave extraordinary levels of detail of violence that occurred to them in the workplace," Taylor says. She has been warned that she will be attacked, but says that, for too long, people have stayed silent. "Nobody goes to work to be intimidated or harassed or sexually assaulted or raped, and find that, not only can they not report, but when they do they are set upon ...

"In 2017, we cannot have any silence around that."