Sex, power and professionals: the nature, extent and administrative justice responses to sexual misconduct and abuse perpetrated by professionals

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This project seeks to theorise sexual misconduct and abuse perpetrated by UK professionals and to evaluate critically the regulatory and administrative justice mechanisms used to investigate and sanction such behaviour. This study adopts a feminist relational view of power to focus specifically on doctors, psychiatrists, Anglican and Catholic clergy, police, judges, barristers, military, and politicians. Literature review and process mapping work will first be used to benchmark the UK with comparator jurisdictions (New Zealand; Victoria, Australia; Ontario, Canada) and to develop data collection instruments. Retrospective case analysis of tribunal data and interviews with regulators and trade journalists will be conducted. A combination of framework analysis, descriptive statistics and visualisation software will explore how social relations of power operate and intersect with context and opportunity at the (a) individual (b) organisational-professional and (c) socio-cultural level, to account for professional abuse. Further, and with reference to the selected international benchmarks, the effectiveness of administrative justice mechanisms will be evaluated. In the UK, little current data on sexual misconduct and abuse exists outside the health sector. Collating data on this scale will be a UK first; across such diverse professions, an international first. Extant international studies are conducted within professions rather than across; focused on single sectors rather than multiple; and approached from a risk-management perspective rather than informed by analyses of power and inequality. Furthermore, using administrative justice mechanisms to respond to sexual misconduct is largely overlooked yet critical in an era of #MeToo and low victim trust in the criminal justice system. Urgent work is required to understand how far such mechanisms administratively segregate and exonerate professional perpetrators or can offer effective sanction and deterrence.