Research update: staff sexual misconduct articles

The four articles outlined below give you an overview of my peer-reviewed research on staff sexual harassment in UK higher education, mostly co-authored with Tiffany Page.

The articles all report on data from the same study, originally summarised in the public report ‘Silencing Students: Institutional Responses to Staff Sexual Misconduct in Higher Education’. The data drawn on for the report and these articles is interviews with 15 students and 1 early career academic in UK higher education who had reported or attempted to report sexual harassment/violence from a member of academic staff to their university or the police. Interviews were carried out in early 2018. This is important to note as many universities have been making changes to their processes since then, and so the findings in the fourth article may need to be updated drawing on ongoing data collection I am doing, along with Erin Shannon, for the ESRC-funded research project Higher Education After MeToo (currently underway).

The articles cover (1) ‘grooming’ and boundary-blurring behaviours 2) why people report staff sexual misconduct to their universities (3) an overview of our recommendations for changes to complaints and disciplinary processes, and (4) what happens at the end of the complaints process. Read on for a summary of each. As always, if you don’t have access and there isn’t a pre-publication version here, email me anna.bull@york.ac.uk for a copy.