“It’s the culture that determines if non-disclosure agreements are allowed to be used,” says Kristina Fifield, a trauma therapist in Nova Scotia who is leading an NDA-informed training session on Tuesday, Feb 4, from 11am-12pm. It’s organized by the advocacy group Can’t Buy My Silence.
NDAs are “gag order” agreements that are frequently used in workplace settlement or grievance cases. The problem is that they “impose silence,” CBMS writes, thus “deepening trauma through institutional betrayal and secondary wounding” to survivors of harassment, discrimination, and misconduct.
For example, someone experiences pregnancy discrimination at work. They sign an NDA on the condition that their employer investigates and commits to action but are now silenced from talking about the stress or shame this process caused them with their friends, family and therapist—regardless of whether things improve or they see the discrimination happen to someone else.
The culture that Fifield mentioned, the one that allows NDAs to continue to be used as frequently as they are, is one of “covering up, of silencing people and allowing a continuum of violence to happen,” she says.
Fifield and CBMS’s co-founder, law professor Julie Macfarlane, will lead Tuesday’s session, which will cover the legal background and knock-on consequences of NDAs, offer alternatives to signing them (that still protect confidentiality) and give advice for service providers and peers on how to support survivors already impacted by these agreements. The session is about empowering survivors, “informed, passionate care,” and inspiring “systemic change, writes the group.
Registration for the one-hour virtual session is still open (and can be anonymous), with a suggested price of $10.
Fifield says the session fills many needs. It can help those survivors and victims being asked to sign an NDA, or those who have already signed one, learn ways to navigate their situation by asking for an alternative or submitting a letter requesting to be released from their agreement. “Because of the power dynamics at play, individuals are not always informed about other ways of moving forward,” says Fifield. “Too often, we hear that NDAs are the status quo or that you must sign an NDA to get a settlement and financial compensation. Very often, survivors and victims of different forms of violence are not informed about one-sided confidentiality agreements.”
It’s also important for union representatives, people in human resource departments, community organizers who offer services to survivors and victims, and lawyers to get this training to address this “status quo culture where NDAs have been introduced and are now being used for everything,” says Fifield.
Doing this work, Fifield has seen survivors be successfully released from their NDAs. She has also worked with people who were in the process of being asked to sign, but were able to push back and talk about the harmful impacts of signing with their lawyer, their union representative or their employer—and restructure their settlement agreement without an NDA.
Fifield says another focus in the NDA training sessions is on the data being collected by CBMS, through an anonymous survey and testimonials, on how often these agreements are being signed, in what types of situations and by whom. “In the past, collected data showed four times as many women as men sign NDAs, and that number is actually up now to about five times as many women as compared to men.”
Looking at these statistics “through a gender-based violence lens is really important,” because GBV is “not just about sexual violence and sexual harassment,” says Fifield. “NDAs are being used in pregnancy discrimination cases, which is a gender-based violence issue, with failures to accommodate women in certain situations in workplaces and then, of course, in sexual violence and sexual harassment cases.
“I really do think it’s important with everything that’s happening across Canada and in our province, with the increase and epidemic of gender-based violence, that we’re directly connecting that to the abusive use of NDAs.”
This article appears in Feb 1-28, 2025.