Themed issue on sexual abuse in organisations: invited introduction and commentary

Twenty five years ago, US criminologist Lawrence Sherman wryly asked: “If future crime is six times more predictable by the address of its occurrence than by the identity of the offender, why aren’t we thinking more about wheredunit, rather than just whodunit?” (Sherman, 1995, pp. 36–37). Many empirical observations that crimes of various kinds are more likely to occur in particular places, and at particular times, have since led to significant reductions in the incidence of specific crimes, ranging from bicycle theft to residential burglaries, to assaults in and around bars, to armed robbery, and so on (see e.g. Wortley & Townsley, 2016). Analysing and responding to the spatial and temporal dimensions of specific kinds of crime is now commonplace among crime prevention agents and practitioners.

With its conceptual roots in psychiatry and clinical psychology, rather than in criminology and crime prevention, research, and professional practice concerning sexual crimes have regrettably been slower to embrace place-based or situational prevention than has been the case with most other kinds of crime. It is noteworthy that, by contrast, recent major inquiries into sexual abuse in organisations, especially the UK and Australian Inquiries, seem to have readily recognised the potential of the situational perspective for understanding how specific features of some organisational settings may enable, facilitate or precipitate abuse. Anecdotally, many organisational leaders in turn also seem to have embraced this perspective as a practical approach to identifying, avoiding, and managing potential problems within their particular organisational environment. The present themed issue on sexual violence and abuse in organisational settings is therefore timely and important.

Particularly compared to domestic settings, which are by definition private spaces, organisational settings are highly conducive to preventive interventions – organisations can devise sensible prevention strategies; organisational leaders can modify problematic aspects of their particular settings; multiple potential guardians are often present; and organisational activities can be subjected to internal and external regulation and oversight. The key prevention agents for organisational abuse are therefore organisational leaders, employees, and volunteers themselves. Aside from government policy makers, it is these organisational personnel with whom researchers and practitioners should be looking to engage. Such engagement begins with identifying prevention-centred research questions and should involve conducting and reporting research in ways that are relevant to the day-to-day concerns of organisations, and perhaps assisting with the implementation and evaluation of preventive interventions. Organisations need to understand the various permutations of abuse; how, when, and where these may arise within their specific context; and what they can do to prevent abuse from occurring before it might otherwise do so. Responding appropriately after abuse has occurred is also obviously important; however, it goes without saying that children’s interests are best served by preventing them from being abused in the first place. Indeed, prevention is better for everyone.

As a number of contributors to this themed issue have noted, there are commonalities, but also important differences, in the dynamics of sexual crimes that occur in domestic, organisational, public, and virtual settings. One difference seems to be that female adults are relatively more likely to abuse in some organisational settings, particularly schools, than they are in other settings. Darling and Hackett (2020) describe in some detail particular situational and contextual dynamics – behavioural antecedents; pre-abuse relationships; organisational roles of abusers; specific abuse locations; and so on – involved in a sizeable and international sample of sexual abuse cases committed by female perpetrators in a range of organisational settings. Along similar lines, Christensen and Darling (2020) examine similarities and differences between smaller cohorts of male and female teachers who abused school students. The focus in both of these studies – observable behaviours in specific contexts – is exactly the kind of prevention-centred approach that might help organisational leaders to understand how risks within their organisation may vary according to the characteristics of particular locations and routine activities.

Another unusual aspect of sexual abuse in organisational settings, relative to other kinds of setting, is that peer-peer abuse may be more likely than an adult-child abuse. Malvaso, Proeve, Delfabbro, and Cale (2020) report on their review of studies of the characteristics of children and youth who had abused. Although they were interested to examine youth abuse specifically in organisations, of the 78 studies included in their review just four reported on the locations of abuse. This is a stark illustration of just how little significance researchers in this field have historically attributed to the characteristics of the settings in which abuse occurs. Given the potential significance of peer-peer abuse in some organisational settings, there is clearly a need for research that can be of practical use by organisational leaders in their efforts to prevent such problems.

Erooga, Kaufman, and Zatkin (2020) report on an analysis of 17 case reports concerning so-called “powerful” perpetrators of abuse in organisational settings. These are the abusers who, when finally caught, have tended to attract a great deal of media, and therefore public and political, attention. The focus for Erooga et al. is on how such prominent organisational employees or associates have seemed to be allowed by organisational leaders and others to be somehow exempted from the usual regulatory systems or to have otherwise used their unusual “power” to abuse. While this may well be a fruitful line of research, in my estimation, at least, it is often the circumstances of those with the least “power” in organisations that seem to pose the most significant risk. Particularly in large care organisations, for example, it is those with the least experience, the least training, the smallest wages, and the least organisational influence, who spend the most time interacting with the most vulnerable children in the most risky circumstances. Clearly, to take Erooga et al.’s point, a challenge for organisations is to ensure all personnel – powerful and otherwise – are equally required to adhere to child-safe rules and regulations.

The types of setting in which sexual violence and abuse occur are not, of course, always exclusive. Krone et al. (2020) look at the overlap of organisational and virtual settings – specifically the production, distribution, and use of online child sexual abuse material in organisational settings. These authors make a number of recommendations for organisational policies aimed at preventing such problems, based on the situational crime prevention principles of increasing effort; increasing perceived risks; reducing rewards; removing excuses; and removing temptations. This article draws attention to the wider issue that organisational policies concerning sexual abuse need to account for the many different permutations of the problem – even within a single organisation, such as an individual school, different strategies are likely to be needed for preventing inappropriate physical contact between teachers and students, peer-peer abuse, and different kinds of online abuse, for example.

No doubt largely in response to the public inquiries, over recent years many thousands of organisations have been reworking their child-safe systems, policies, and practices. Much of this has been driven by new externally imposed regulatory systems, especially concerning employment screening and incident reporting. Guidelines for organisations to conduct their own internal audits have also increasingly become available, though few, if any, have been properly validated. McKillop, Rayment-McHugh, Kaufman, Ransley, and Gardiner’s (2020) study is one of the first to undertake a rigorous validation and refinement of an existing organisational self-assessment measure. This is a good example of researchers engaging directly with organisational leaders and personnel to develop practical, evidence-based methods for measuring, and therefore monitoring the local effects of, child-safe systems, policies, and practice.

Finally, there is little doubt that reports of sexual abuse are now more likely to be believed and on-reported than has been the case in the past. Nevertheless, in organisational (and other) settings, individual beliefs and biases, ambiguities, various allegiances, and organisational systems, can still present difficulties for first responders (see Munro & Fish, 2015, for an analysis prepared for the Australian Royal Commission). Harper, Perkins, and Johnson (2020) investigate whether members of religious groups, in this case, Anglican Church members, differ from non-members in their attitude to hypothetical abuse reporting scenarios, including scenarios of abuse within the church. This is another good example of researchers engaging with organisational personnel to investigate issues of practical relevance for the organisation. Although the recent inquiries indicate that religious organisations may have particular problems responding properly to relevant concerns, as Munro and Fish (2015) point out the roots of these problems may be primarily in ordinary unconscious human biases and in a range of organisational systems and cultures. The good news seem to be that these problems can be effectively countered, not so much by individuals who by definition are unaware of their own unconscious biases, but by creating organisational cultures that acknowledge difficulties and ambiguities and where difficult judgements can be openly discussed and mistakes routinely reported without fear of recrimination.

Conclusions

Research and practice concerning sexual crimes have contributed useful knowledge primarily about the outcomes of these crimes on offenders, victims, and others. Much less attention has been given to how abuse begins and even less to where and when abuse occurs, and how certain places and activities may enable or facilitate this kind of problem behaviour. In the recent past, child – and youth-serving organisations have been able to explain abuse as a problem of a few individual “bad apples” over which they had little control, and the best that was hoped for was that organisational leaders would respond appropriately to incidents after they had come to light. Recent commissions of inquiry have instead emphasised the responsibilities of organisations themselves to provide and maintain safe environments for the children and young people in their care. These formal Inquiries have in many ways been more concerned with the behaviour of organisations than with the behaviour of individual offenders. The present themed issue is important because it recognises the significance of place in the commission of sexual crimes. There is a great need for more similarly-focused research that can be of practical use to organisations in their efforts to prevent and better respond to abuse.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).