History

Guy Dehn had the first inkling of a project like Witness Confident in the summer of 2008 shortly after he left Public Concern at Work, the whistleblowing charity, that he had founded and ran since 1993.  In one way, Witness Confident is addressing the same dilemma as to how to get people to speak up when the interests of others (rather than their own) are at stake: the difference being that Witness Confident is addressing this issue in the wider community and in the contexts of violent crime and the walk-on-by society, while Public Concern at Work focuses on wrongdong in the workplace.

Initial consultations with people familiar with the criminal justice system indicated that the witness dilemma was an elephant in the room – something so big and dificult that people had lost sight of it.  At the same time the Tory think tank Reform warned that Britain was becoming a nation of passive bystanders “where people feel increasingly incapable and unconfident to maintain the rule of law themselves, instead abdicating responsibility to a remote and technocratic criminal justice system” and a report by Louise Casey for the Prime Minister began “Crime is tackled most effectively when the law-abiding majority stand together against the minority who commit it”.  The senseless murders that summer of Frank McGarahan in Norwich, Ben Kinsella in Islington and of Shaquille Smith in Hackney brought home the tragic and too real consequences of the current culture.  While those responsible for those murders have been convicted, the cases demonstrated the pressing need for ordinary decent people to be given the confidence to stand up to violent crime.  The first outline proposal for a charity to address this issue was drafted on 7th September 2008 and, a year later, on 9/9/9, we launched.