Dr Erin Shannon

This paper examines the tension between safeguarding measures and participant agency in conducting feminist interviews with survivors of sexual violence in universities. There is a core contradiction inherent in feminist research of gender-related violence, including sexual violence, because participants have been traumatized: Research with survivors of violence must enact appropriate safeguarding measures to ensure their emotional wellbeing, yet in designing these safeguarding measures, researchers must also ensure that survivor participants can exert agency within the research process. These phenomena are often at odds as safeguarding—the work of protecting participants through limiting their exposure to upsetting stimuli—appears to circumscribe participant agency, or a participant’s ability to make informed choices for themselves that respond to and change the structures in which they are situated. Using part of my doctoral thesis research’s methodology, I detail the safeguarding measures I implemented for participants as well as highlight how and where I attempted to build in agential engagement for survivor participants, and whether, or how often, survivors took up these options. The article concludes by suggesting ways gender-related violence research more broadly can reflect on and continue to interrogate how researchers balance safeguarding requirements while enabling survivors to assert their agency in the research process.

Following movements like #MeToo, #RUReferenceList, and #NiUnaMenos, university students and staff shared their experiences on social media of harassment and abuse within academia. However, despite calls to “break the silence,” victim-survivors frequently face institutional retaliation and backlash from people responsible for harm. Naming nevertheless remains an important part of the accountability and healing processes for some victim-survivors. Additionally, in the absence of larger accountability and victim-survivor-centred reporting processes, some academics and activists have also called for university-handled lists naming people with upheld findings within universities similar to sex offender registries. In this commentary piece based on discussions between Joel Quirk and Judith Levine in a March 2024 webinar, we analyse the politics of naming those responsible for sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), including questions such as who should name, when should naming occur, and what kind of justice do we seek. This piece highlights the complexities of publicly naming those who have engaged in SGBV in universities, particularly through a transformative justice lens, and indicates a lack of institutional avenues for justice and accountability.

This paper examines four interviews with student survivors about their experiences of reporting sexual harassment and violence to universities in the United States and England, and their experiences of how their universities protected the perpetrators. Interview participants revealed that their assailants were not held accountable because the university determined they were more valuable than the survivor, whether in terms of the role the assailant occupied or their potential to make an impact in their field. I analyse these instances by combining three theories to show both how power/value relations in the neoliberal university make certain people (in)dispensable, and how these power/value relations are enacted through power dynamics of speech and hearing to protect the more ‘valuable’ party in university sexual violence cases. The article concludes with possible recommendations for structural change.

This article explores trust in organisations by analysing interview data from students and staff who have disclosed or reported gender-based violence and harassment (GBVH) to their higher education institution in the UK since 2016. GBVH contributes to gender inequality in higher education (HE), and increased reporting of it may not only help prevent GBVH, but also improve gender equality by helping to retain women and gender minorities within HE. Around half of the interviewees in this study (n = 12) expressed distrust in their institution, yet despite this they still reported or disclosed their experiences to their institution. Existing literature in this area, particularly the concept of institutional betrayal, assumes that survivors of GBVH trust their institutions—including HE institutions—because they are dependent upon said institutions. Our data challenges this assumption, and in this article, we analyse participants' trust orientations in the context of their reasons for reporting. We argue that dependence on and trust in institutions are separate phenomena, in that members of an organisation may be dependent upon the organisation in various ways, but their trust in the organisation reflects their structural positioning within it. To develop the theorisation of trust in institutional betrayal, we draw on and extend Luhmann's concept of ‘system trust’ as well as other sociological theories of trust. Finally, the article introduces the concept of ‘unwilling trust’—a contradiction between an individual acting in trusting ways despite feeling a lack of trust—to explain this disconnect between dispositions and actions.

Formal complaints and disciplinary processes constitute a mandatory aspect of organizational responses for addressing sexual harassment in many jurisdictions. However, previous research has found that reporting parties are not well served by such processes. In particular, Ahmed (Complaint!; 2021) argues that the institutional climate that enables harassment or discrimination to occur—including its gendered dynamics—also shapes how complaints about harassment are handled. Building on Ahmed's work, this article analyses how gender “gets into” formal reporting processes for sexual harassment within organizations. It draws on interviews with 18 students and staff who went through a formal institutional reporting process for gender-based violence or harassment in UK higher education between 2016 and 2021. Using Connell's theorization of “gender regimes,” we outline how “dimensions of gender” within organizations affected different stages of formal reporting processes, including how evidence was gathered during reporting processes, as well as how it was assessed. These findings demonstrate that gender regimes—via gender relations of power, gendered “attachments and investments,” and “gender-neutral” processes—can override formal processes and affect outcomes of sexual harassment reporting. These findings explain how gender regimes contribute to the failure of sexual harassment complaints to be upheld within organizations.

The intersection of the viral #MeToo campaign with recent Black Lives Matter protests produced more mainstream discussions of abolitionist approaches to sexual violence, which include transformative justice. In this article, we explore the implications of these discussions for universities in England, which have had less attention from abolitionists than institutions in the US (see for example Coker, 2016; Boggs et al, 2019; Méndez, 2020), and in which there is increasing demand for bureaucratic and punitive regulation (Phipps, 2024). First, we review transformative- and restorative-justice projects already implemented in universities and discuss their levels of success. Second, our article asks: what conditions of possibility are necessary for exploring, let alone implementing, transformative justice in English universities? We approach this question from two angles – assessing processes and relationships, and the adversarial procedural frameworks currently employed to tackle sexual violence – and ask how the connections and trust necessary for meaningful accountability (Kaba, 2021) could be built in the university space. We also ask how such work might avoid being co-opted and made non-performative (Ahmed, 2012) in the interests of preserving the status quo. Our analysis is situated in the colonial history of universities and their contemporary financial and political entanglements, and the neoliberalisation of higher education, especially in England and Wales.