I still remember the case that kept me awake for a week. A young woman filed a POSH complaint. Within days, her manager moved her to a smaller desk, excluded her from team lunches, and gave her a poor performance review for work she had not even completed yet.

The respondent never threatened her. He never shouted. But he destroyed her career silently, and no one on the ICC noticed – including me, initially.

That case taught me that retaliation is rarely loud. It is a whispered “She is difficult to work with” in a skip-level meeting. It is an email reassigning her projects without explanation. It is the slow, quiet erosion of a person’s place in an organization.

Now, as an ICC member, I train other committee members to ask three specific questions during every inquiry:

1. “What changed for the complainant between the incident and today?”
2. “Who gains if this complainant is discredited?”
3. “Is there a pattern of silence from other witnesses who used to speak to her?”

These questions are emotional intelligence in action. They are not soft – they are forensic. Without them, ICCs become bystanders to slow violence. I learned that the hard way, and I will not make that mistake again.