Doctors, police officers, judges, and clergy who sexually abuse those in their care are the focus of a new study that will, for the first time, map the scale of this misconduct across multiple UK professions and assess whether the bodies that regulate them are fit for purpose. This matters because current data on professional sexual abuse is patchy—comprehensive figures exist only for healthcare, leaving other sectors unexamined. The research fills a gap by treating abuse not as isolated bad behaviour but as a product of power relations, organisational culture, and opportunity. It also asks whether administrative tribunals, rather than criminal courts, can effectively sanction perpetrators or whether they instead shield them from consequences. If successful, the project will produce the first cross-profession dataset of its kind in the UK and internationally. This could change how regulators investigate complaints, how professional bodies design disciplinary processes, and how victims navigate reporting. In an era of low trust in the criminal justice system, the findings may reshape the quiet machinery of professional oversight that determines whether abuse is punished or quietly excused.
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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.
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