ABSTRACT
This chapter focusses specifically on staff-to-staff (or sometimes student-to-staff) sexual misconduct in UK higher education, considered in the context of wider de-regulation of labour protections and right-wing government anti-trade union measures as well as closures of women’s shelters and other ‘austerity’ measures of recent years. Building on recent data, the chapter considers the structures of intersectional inequalities and precarity in UK higher education, alongside the increased production of university policy on sexual misconduct. Critical of the ‘non-performative commitments’ of policy without practice, the chapter examines how precarity at work in university spaces creates favourable conditions for sexual misconduct, thus increasing the risks of gendered and other forms of harm and abuse, and prevents survivors and victims from speaking out, and notes the importance of industrial work to counteract exploitative structures and conditions.
