But for the reputation advisor, when it comes to the reputational threat, beyond possession of the requisite technical, communications and legal skills; beyond an understanding of context and likely impact based on accumulated experience, what is actually known about the individuals who make reputational threats? And how much is known about the nature of the threats themselves? We think, not a lot.
We were exploring a sample of our casework as part of a paper on the making of threats (we will share shortly) using a cross sector, cross motivational snapshot of priority cases in which Theseus has been asked to provide opinion on risk. As part of that work we isolated cases within the data set that contained threats to harm in any way, comprising over 500 individual threats.
It was interesting to find that the majority of these cases included within them threats to harm reputation. So we isolated these and looked more closely.
There is more to say than can be stated in just one or two Insights, including practice points to suggest what the findings might mean for the reputational risk manager, so we offer this initial article as a ‘scene-setter’. In aggregate, our hope is that the findings and associated practice points might form a peg towards which one might (tentatively) start to reach with a hat in relation to aspects of the who, how and why of the reputational threat.
Those who threatened reputation fell in to two groups. The ‘purists’, as it were, who only threatened reputation, whether once or multiple times, and the ‘mixed’, who threatened reputation among other forms of harm, such as physical or sexual violence, psychological harm, to approach, or to persist or escalate their behaviour, for example.
Overall, the majority of cases (61%) involved the making of purely reputational threats; the balance, reputational threats issued among other forms of harm.
By way of brief descriptive analysis, these two groups of threateners did not appear to be statistically differentiated by motivation, by purpose of the threat, or by the type of previous relationship the threatener had with the recipient, or absence thereof.
The majority (64%) of reputational threats were ‘scheming’ in terms of their 1purpose. In other words, the threatener’s intent was to make the recipient change their behaviour in some way, or do something the recipient did not want to do. In short, the sort of threat around which the blackmail demand tends to come wrapped. The remainder were intended as ‘shocking’, in that they were designed to instil upset and anxiety in the recipient.
Reputational threats were split roughly equally between those directed at recipients in the corporate sector, and those in the talent management and private client world. This may seem incidental, in that this merely reflects the sectors Theseus supports. Of course, it does. But it also confirms the fact that the threatening of reputational harm, rather than being the preserve of a particular industry that feels itself in ‘the eye of the storm’ in this regard, is in fact ubiquitous.
More than half of reputational threats were made by individuals classified as 2Resentful by motivation, in other words, by the aggrieved, whose intrusion we already know tends to predominate in the corporate sector and to be among the most 3persistent.
The Rejected (from intimate relationships) and Relationship Seekers together made up most of the balance of the threats to harm reputation. That those seeking relationships should feature so prominently reinforces what we had assumed, albeit anecdotally until now, in that our experience has been that when ignored, spurned or ridiculed, relationship seeking can often harden very quickly into the making of reputational threats, particularly online and particularly in the talent management sector.
In terms of threat structure, a primary harm tended to be threatened, often then being reinforced by secondary threats, whether related in nature or different. In the case of reputation, threats of imprisonment or demands for resignation frequently accompanied the primary threat to reputation.
But the strongest association was that those who threatened reputation were significantly more likely than those who did not, to also threaten legal action. This makes sense, in as much as a threat to take legal action in itself implies reputational harm on the one hand, and is a logical means of backing up reputationally harmful intent on the other.
The purists, those who only threatened reputation, tended to use fewer threats, and fewer types of threat (whether direct, indirect, veiled, conditional or implied) than those who threatened multiple harms. Why might this be the case? Focus, is one explanation. These individuals are not threatening anything and everything, they are threatening something.
The relative lack of severe mental illness among the pure reputational threateners, by comparison with the mixed threatener group, in which it was high (43.5%) is likely to be another.
One striking finding was that across both the pure and mixed reputational threatener groups, approximately one third of their threats had been carried out or were in progress at the point of referral to Theseus.
This seemed a high proportion. Why might this be the case? Of course some of our casework is referred by law firms. In the same way, were one trying to identify individuals with coronary disease, for example, it is easier to do so standing in a GP’s surgery than in the high street, so it is with the reputational threat. It shouldn’t be surprising to find a greater number of such threats ‘in motion’ among legal referrals. But law firms refer a minority of our casework.
Other possibilities necessarily suggest themselves. One being, in our Big Tech epoch, that such threats are simply very easy to communicate and very easy to execute. But we will get into the whys and wherefores in further Insights of this series.
