Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Questions as to the mental capacity of an individual to consent to sex are an increasingly important aspect of legal scholarship and professional practice for those working in care. Recent case law has added new layers of complexity, requiring that a person must be able to understand that the other person needs to consent and can withdraw that consent. While this has been welcomed for asserting the importance of the interpersonal dynamics of sex, it has significant implications for practice and for the day-to-day lives of people with cognitive impairments.
This collection brings together academics, practitioners and organisations to consider the challenges posed by the current legal framework, and future directions for law, policy and practice.
This chapter focuses on the rights of people living with dementia to sexual and intimate lives from a psychiatric perspective. Older people, including people living with dementia, continue to enjoy active sex lives, but the legal position is for individuals engaging in sexual activity to give ‘here and now’ consent to such activities, creating legal uncertainty where there is doubt about an individual’s ability to consent. As a result, the current legal position can dissuade professionals and carers from allowing sexual relations to take place, resulting in discrimination reflecting ageism and ableism, and a violation of an individual’s rights to privacy and private life. We argue that more can and should be done to promote sexual intimacy among people living with dementia, requiring a shift from a medical view of the condition, to one which situates it within its social context.
This chapter explores the arguments presented by the authors in Chapters 5 to 8 and – using practice examples – reflects on their implications and significance for health and social care professionals engaged in supporting disabled adults. It suggests ways in which the law might be reformed in order to better reflect the lives of disabled adults and ensure they are better supported to engage in fulfilling sexual relationships, while also being sufficiently protected from sexual exploitation.
This chapter reflects on the arguments put forward in the first three chapters of the collection. It considers the implications the authors’ arguments for those involved in supporting disabled adults to realise the right to sexual enjoyment, with a particular focus on the implications of the judgment of the Supreme Court in A Local Authority v JB [2021] UKSC in exploring a person’s understanding of consent, and the need for effective sexual education.
Since the mid-2010s, the courts in England and Wales have been determining questions of sexual decision-making capacity by asking whether the person is capable of consenting to sexual activity. Consequently, the courts have reached further and further into the bedroom, with profound implications for the rights of those with cognitive impairments to express themselves sexually. In 2021, the question of how courts should consider the question of sexual decision-making capacity finally reached the Supreme Court in the case of A Local Authority v JB [2021] UKSC 52 (‘JB’). In this chapter, two English and one Irish authors explore the clash of principles the case illuminates: between the need for sexual consent to be true consent, and the need to support the exercise of sexual expression by those with cognitive impairments. The chapter examines why the clash is so fundamental, including by reference to sometimes forgotten debates preceding legislation in both England and Wales and, for comparison, Ireland, and human rights arguments. It sets out a way in which it may be possible to approach matters which may not eliminate, but may at least mitigate, the clash of principles that arises in consequence of the law’s involvement.
Social work practice has been rightly criticised for failing to adequately promote and protect the sexual rights and wellbeing of people who use adult social care. Too frequently, practice has been risk averse, focused on regulating the intimate lives of people supported by services and adopting a reductionist understanding of what constitutes sex and intimacy. This has particularly been the case in the lives of people who are assessed as lacking capacity to consent to sexual and intimate activities or where there are concerns about this capacity (whether well placed or not). Despite some progress, social work practice has yet to fully embrace the potential of person-centred and relational practice, despite the promise created by the Mental Capacity Act 2005, the Care Act 2014 and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. This chapter advocates an approach that draws on a blend of literacies for practice, notably an integration of legal, relational, ethical and emotional literacies that is grounded in disability studies and the claims of the disabled people’s movement. The chapter concludes with a number of vignettes that demonstrate the impact this approach can and should have and outlines how the underpinning principles can be implemented in practice.
This chapter identifies the potentially disruptive nature of the digitalization of workplaces in terms of our understanding of the ‘self’ at work. Traditional divides around work and private life, mind and body, machine and human are increasingly being reshaped by the introduction of certain kinds of technology into the labour market. It then proceeds to outline how these changes might be conceptualized on the traditional labour law narrative and the issues which arise from the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) into the workplace according to our inherited understanding of ‘personhood’; namely, the effect of AI on worker ‘rationality’ and ‘autonomy’. In this chapter, there is an investigation of the potential benefits and implications of changing our approach to ‘personhood’ in a theoretical sense. The final section explores how the alternative vision of personhood might be adopted, in practical terms, to increase the effectiveness of the regulation of AI in the workplace.
This chapter investigates how the COVID-19 pandemic has challenged our most basic assumptions about our ‘selves’ at work, and (hence) the relationship between labour law and social justice. On the one hand, the pandemic reemphasized worker corporeality and led to a greater incursion of health and safety concerns into the workplace. On the other hand, the COVID-19 pandemic served to accentuate the individualist and rationalist conception of the person at the heart of the law of the workplace. The chapter investigates the obstacles that this individualist/rationalist conceptualization of the person has caused in regulating the workplace both during and post-COVID. This approach has led to the erosion of collective and negotiated solutions, the equation of employee and employer struggles, and the inability of the law to protect those workers most in need. It is argued in the chapter that the analysis of labour law in the pandemic points to the need for a greater engagement with the moral project of embedding relationality at the heart of labour law, in order that labour law can better respond to labour market ‘shocks’.
