How can I protect myself from an aggressive customer?
How do I stop people from bullying me with text messages?
My son is being bullied by some older kids at his school. What should I do?
How can I protect myself from an aggressive customer?
Bullying is usually thought of as something that happens in the playground, but this is not the only place it occurs. It can happen in the workplace, in a relationship, or in a social situation.
Working in a retail or service industry job means you will occasionally come across some very angry and aggressive customers. Sometimes these customers aren’t angry at you personally, but they will nevertheless take out their feelings on you. The key thing to controlling what could be a dangerous situation is to remain calm, polite, attentive, and acknowledge their feelings.
You should start by allowing the customer to vent their feelings without interruptions or argument. Sometimes they will be more open to a compromise once they’ve said their piece.
If talking through the problem doesn’t work, the Police recommend you follow these rules:
- ask the person not be aggressive or abusive
- if your request is ignored, politely but firmly ask the person to leave the store
- if the person refuses to leave the store, call 111 and ask for Police
- if you’re alone in the store, stay in public view
- if you can’t call the Police from a position of public view, move to the shop entrance and ask someone else to call the Police
- don’t argue with the customer and never turn your back on them
- if possible, make sure you have someone else with you, or that someone can see what’s happening
- don’t try to touch the person or escort them out of the store
- if the customer assaults you, ask staff members and other customers to take note of the person’s appearance and their actions
More information on protecting your business and your employees against crime is available from the Police website.
The Police website also has a number of business crime prevention booklets in different languages:
- Arabic
- Chinese
- Hindi
- Korean
- Punjabi
If someone continues to behave aggressively towards you, consider taking out a trespass order against them. If you want to find out the rules about trespass orders, see our information on Law Enforcement.
How do I stop people from bullying me with text messages?
Text message bullying is becoming increasingly common and can have terrible effects on the victim's self confidence.
If you're a Vodafone customer you can use their free blacklisting service to block messages from any number.
If you're a customer of another service provider and you have received 4 or more unwanted text messages from the same number within a week, they can help you out with this problem, but it's important to:
- avoid replying to the messages, and
- keep the messages as evidence, or keep a log of the times, dates, content of the messages, as well as the numbers of the senders.
When you report this to your service provider they can send a warning message to the bully or bar them from the network.
More advice about dealing with text bullying, including the contact details for mobile network providers, is on the Netsafe website. You can also call Netsafe on 0508 NETSAFE (0508 638 723) to get some advice on how to deal with your problem.
If you are being harassed at school, you could ask the school to step in, or follow the steps outlined in our School section.
If the harassment includes threats to harm you physically, you should inform your local police station. They will handle the threat according to the situation.
A range of different support systems is available for victims of bullying. For more information, see below.
My son is being bullied by some older kids at his school. What should I do?
There are a number of steps that you can take to find out what’s happening to your son, to give him support and stop the bullying. These steps are outlined in our School section.
A range of different support systems is available for victims of bullying.
The Wellington Community Law Centre has also put out a 
comprehensive guide that includes how schools might deal with bullying.