Abstract Book of the 6th International Conference on Gender Studies and Sexuality
Year: 2025
[PDF]
Collapsing the Canteen: Encouraging and Empowering Police Personnel to Report Sexual Misconduct amongst their Colleagues
Hollie Trollen, Dr. Valentina Canessa-Pollard, Rylee Spooner
ABSTRACT:
The inefficiency of current disciplinary processes for police personnel misconduct (Casey, 2023) raises serious concerns about the existence of the “blue wall of silence” — a phenomenon suggesting a pervasive pattern of deception and truth withholding within the police, creating a ritual cover-up for their colleagues (Wieslander, 2018). The first study will be a scoping review of current literature, aimed to (1) provide clarity around what constitutes as policing culture, (2) to decipher if sexual misconduct in policing is affected by ranking officers and civilian staff, (3) collate rationales to evidence that sexual misconduct is a prevalent issue, and (4) explore if training tactics are employed by national or international constabularies which are effective at eradicating sexual misconduct perpetration. The second study will be a national survey for policing personnel to ascertain the relationship between the organisational “canteen” subculture (Gutschmidt and Vera, 2020), attitudes towards sexually inappropriate behaviour (Urban and Pyland, 2021) and bystander behaviours (Farzand et al., 2022) impact on reporting sexual harmful behaviours (Estrada et al., 2011) among police personnel. Results to be analysed using a moderated mediation analysis to explore how overall workplace culture affects decision-making on reporting sexually harmful behaviour in policing.
Keywords: police, sexual misconduct, workplace, blue wall of silence