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Copyright

Anna Bull;

Published On

2025-06-23

Page Range

pp. 127–150

Language

  • English

Print Length

24 pages

6. Creating Content about Gender-Based Violence and Sexuality while Being Subjected to Sexual Harassment

Experiences of UK Screen Industries Workers

  • Anna Bull (author)
Chapter of: Gender-Based Violence in Arts and Culture: Perspectives on Education and Work(pp. 127–150)
Since the 2017 #MeToo movement—which built on Tarana Burke’s 2006 campaign—content in the screen industries concerning gender-based violence has increased in volume, visibility and complexity (Banet-Weiser & Higgins, 2023; De Benedictis et al., 2019). At the same time, evidence has emerged revealing the extent of sexual harassment that occurs within the industries that produce this content. This chapter examines the intersection between representations of gender-based violence in the UK screen industries and the gendered culture of workplaces in which this content is produced. It draws on a study of eighteen workers in the UK screen industries who had been subjected to sexual harassment or violence at work since 2017, focusing on a subset of these accounts in which interviewees described producing content relating to gender-based violence, harassment or sexuality—across journalism, factual entertainment, and drama/comedy—at the same time as negotiating sexual harassment or violence within the workplace in which this material was being produced. The chapter explores three ways in which the conditions of cultural production in the UK screen industries affected representations of gender-based violence, and conversely how these representations acted back on conditions of production: first, how workplace cultures influenced the content produced; second, where content related to gender-based violence and sexuality acted back on workplace culture and women’s agency; and third, where there was a stark contradiction or disjuncture between workplace culture and content. These findings reveal a complex picture of how cultural production and content relating to gender-based violence and sexuality intersect in the UK screen industries. Overall, the chapter argues that content on gender-based violence needs to be produced in conditions of safety that support women’s and other survivors’ creative freedom to tell these stories in complex and varied ways.

Contributors

Anna Bull

(author)
Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Education and Social Justice at University of York

Dr Anna Bull is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Education and Social Justice at the University of York, and co-director of The 1752 Group,1 a research and campaigning organisation working to address sexual misconduct in higher education. As well as multiple academic and public-facing publications on sexual misconduct in higher education, Anna was an academic advisor to the National Union of Students for their report Power in the Academy: Staff Sexual Misconduct in UK Higher Education.2 She sits on national advisory boards to address gender based violence in higher education in the UK and Ireland. She has also carried out research into inequalities in classical music education and her monograph on this topic, Class, Control, and Classical Music, won the British Sociological Association’s 2020 Philip Abrams Prize. Her research into sexual harassment in the film and television industry was published in 2023 in the report Safe to Speak Up? Sexual Harassment in the UK Film and Television Industry since #MeToo.