Yu Zhou (University of Glasgow)
Abramović has a well-known performance art installation — Rest Energy1 — in which she and her lover, Ulay, stand opposite each other. Ulay holds an arrow stretched to its limit with a bowstring, while Abramović holds the bow with the arrow pointing straight at her heart. Their amplified heartbeats make the tension audible. Abramović described this performance as involving “complete and total trust.”2 But what gives the piece its force is not the trust alone, but the asymmetry built into it: although both bodies sustain the moment, safety depends on the one who holds the string.
A similar structure can be found in sex in authority relations (SAR). Here too, intimacy unfolds within a situation that is not neutral. One person stands in a role — teacher, doctor, therapist, supervisor — that can shape the other’s options, prospects, and sense of security. It also explains why SAR is complex — it is at once intimate and institutional, personal and structural. Too often, it is treated either as a matter of private morality or absorbed into broader accounts of sexual violence without attention to what is distinctive about authority itself. Yet SAR raises a particular problem: what happens when a role of authority that is meant to guide, care for, assess, or protect becomes entangled with sexual intimacy? This article aims to offer a brief introduction to SAR and explain why it poses a distinctive challenge for legal and philosophical analysis.
§1 What is SAR?
A useful starting point is to distinguish authority from inequality more generally. Not every unequal relationship is an authority relation. People may differ in age, status, confidence, wealth, or social power without one of them occupying a recognised position of authority over the other.
By contrast, authority in SAR refers to a role-based situation. It is attached to a social or institutional position that gives one person a recognised capacity to direct, assess, supervise, care for, or make decisions affecting another. For example, a lecturer grades and evaluates; a doctor diagnoses and treats; a manager allocates opportunities and determines working conditions. In each case, the authority is not just personal influence. It is also linked to a role that is publicly or institutionally recognised.
On this understanding, SAR are situations in which an authority holder, by virtue of their particular social or familiar roles, possesses formally recognised or implicitly acknowledged authority over another party and engages in sexual behaviour with the subordinate. The point is not simply that one person is more powerful than the other, but that the relationship is already organised by a recognised authority structure with its own expectations, responsibilities, and forms of dependence. Importantly, SAR is defined here descriptively. It names a social phenomenon — sexual conduct arising within recognised authority relations — without entailing that every such case is abusive, wrongful, or criminal.
§2 What Makes SAR Normatively Significant?
Why does SAR matter at the normative level? It matters because SAR does not happen in a neutral space. Even where there is no overt coercion, the presence of authority can change the meaning of the interaction. What appears to be a private relationship may also raise concerns about agency, the proper use of authority, and the trust on which institutional roles depend.
The first reason, then, is that authority can shape, and sometimes distort, the subordinate’s agency. Sexual abuse is often analysed in terms of whether valid consent is obtained, but that framework is too narrow for SAR. Consider a postgraduate student who enters a relationship with a supervisor who still directs their research, controls important feedback, and may later write references or influence funding decisions. There may be no explicit pressure, no threat, and no obvious coercion. The student may even genuinely wish to engage in the relationship. Even so, it would be too quick to conclude that nothing is wrong simply because both parties legally consent. The relationship is formed within a structure in which one person’s role already shapes the other’s options and prospects.
The distortion of agency does not mean that every subordinate in SAR is always coerced, nor that every such choice made in these conditions is wrong. Yet authority can alter the practical world in which choices are made — what feels safe, what seems possible, what refusal may cost. A person may still choose, but the conditions of that choice are no longer neutral. The subordinate may remain willing, yet that willingness is formed within a relationship that already organises their options through supervision, care, evaluation, or control. What makes SAR troubling, then, is not just the possibility of force. Authority can also more quietly shape the field in which intimacy is possible at all, and in doing so distort the subordinate’s agency.
The second reason is that SAR may involve a breach of role-based authority. Authority is legitimate not merely because it is recognised, but because it is exercised in a way that serves the purposes for which the role exists. On a service conception of authority, the point of authority is to help those subject to it better realise reasons that already apply to them, rather than to create new grounds for subordination or private advantage.3 For example, teachers are given authority for education; doctors for treatment; supervisors for management and assessment. These roles are justified because they serve institutional ends, and the legitimacy of authority depends on remaining oriented toward those ends.
This is why SAR cannot be reduced to a purely interpersonal question. Of course, one part of the problem may be that an authority-holder takes advantage of another person. When authority is redirected toward private desire, including sexual gratification, it no longer operates within its proper service function. At that point, the problem is not only that an authority-holder has acted improperly toward another person. It is that a role established to serve others has been turned toward personal ends, and in doing so loses the legitimacy that made its authority rightful in the first place.
But there is also a second dimension to this problem: the role itself may, even without deliberate abuse, be bent away from the purpose that justifies it. For instance, a teacher who becomes a student’s sexual partner, or a therapist who becomes a patient’s intimate partner, is not simply adding romance to an otherwise unchanged relationship. They are introducing a private logic into a role that is supposed to be governed by professional judgment, fairness, care, or fiduciary responsibility, thereby constituting a breach of role-based authority, and weakening or even eliminating the legitimacy of authority.
The third reason SAR matters is that it can erode trust. Authority relations do not function through rules alone. They also depend on a shared expectation that authority will be exercised for the purposes that justify it, and the subordinate’s interests form part of the authority’s own practical reasoning.4 For instance, to maintain the proper functioning of relationships and institutions, students generally trust that evaluation is fair; patients believe that doctors’ treatment is guided by patients’ best interests; and employees trust that managerial authority is not being used for personal gain. This trust is not merely trust in a specific individual but also trust in the role and institutions behind it.
When sexual intimacy becomes entangled with authority, that trust begins to shift. Even if no overt coercion can be shown, and even if no obvious favouritism is visible, the relationship may still change the meaning of authority’s exercise. Others may begin to wonder whether decisions remain impartial, whether institutional standards still hold, and whether the authority-holder is acting within the proper limits of their role. It is an erosion of trust on two levels: internally, by weakening the assurance that authority is still guided by role-based obligations, and externally, by diminishing confidence in the neutrality and integrity of the institution itself. In this sense, SAR is not merely private. It can become a public and institutional problem because it destabilises the legitimacy of authority.
§3 Why SAR Sits Uneasily Within Existing Sexual Offence Laws
As I have argued before, SAR is a descriptive concept, which refers to sexual conduct that takes place within an authority relation. As this concept encompasses lots of instances with different scenarios, it should be noted that not every SAR case is abusive, and not all of them should be criminalised. The legal question is then — which forms of SAR are serious enough to justify legal intervention?
The difficulty is that current legal models are insufficient to address SAR. The most obvious is modern sexual assault offence, which is largely organised around liberal theory, especially its emphasis on autonomy and consent.5 Within that framework, the key issue is whether the complainant agreed, or whether consent was absent, vitiated, or overridden by force, threat, or coercion. That model fits many paradigmatic sexual offences. But it does not fully capture SAR. Some instances of SAR will, of course, involve coercion and can be prosecuted as rape or sexual assault. Others, however, arise where participation appears voluntary in the legal sense, yet the relationship remains deeply shaped by role-based authority, such as the example of the student and supervisor mentioned earlier.
Could SAR, then, be better understood as a kind of corruption or abuse of office? That idea captures something important: authority is entrusted for one purpose and then redirected toward private ends. But this is still not quite right. Corruption law is mainly concerned with the improper exchange or misuse of office.6 SAR is different. It involves the sexualisation of a relationship already structured by care, evaluation, trust, or dependency. The wrong is not always transactional, and it does not always depend on showing that authority was actively traded for sexual access. Sometimes the very coexistence of authority and intimacy is what creates the problem. To call this simply “corruption” risks losing the specifically sexual and relational character of the wrong.
Nor is “inequality” enough. Many intimate relationships are unequal in age, wealth, status, or confidence. But SAR is narrower than that. What matters is not asymmetry in general, but authority: recognised, role-based power justified by institutional or social purposes. If law relies only on inequality, the category becomes too broad and loses what is distinctive about authority-based sexual wrongs.
What follows from this is not that SAR must always be treated as a wholly separate offence category, but that criminal law needs a better way of recognising when authority itself becomes normatively significant in sexual relations. In some systems, that may support carefully bounded “abuse of positions of trust” offences, such as England and Wales and Scotland.7 In others, it may justify a broader authority-based offence, provided the law can still explain clearly what makes these cases different from consent-based sexual assault, corruption, or mere inequality. The key point is that the law should not ask only whether consent was absent. It should also ask whether the relationship is one in which sexual intimacy is rendered wrongful — or even criminal — by the authority structure in which it occurs.
Conclusion
The difficulty with SAR lies in the fact that it cannot be fully subsumed under the categories on which existing laws typically rely. It does not only involve matters of private morality, yet it cannot always be reduced to violence, coercion, or invalid consent. What makes SAR unique is that sexual intimacy occurs within a relationship defined by structures of authority.
This article argues that SAR should first be understood as a descriptive concept. Not all situations are wrong, nor should all be criminalised. However, SAR is significant at the normative level because authority can shape or distort the agency of subordinates, cause roles to deviate from their intended functions, and erode trust in authority figures and the institutions they represent.
Furthermore, SAR is difficult to situate within existing legislation. Whilst a consent-based framework of sexual assault may cover some cases – particularly those involving invalid consent – it cannot fully account for other situations where participation appears voluntary but is in fact influenced or shaped by authority. Nor can SAR be simply reduced to corruption or more general inequalities. The scope of the issue is narrower and more specific: it concerns sexual intimacy within established relationships of authority.
Consequently, this piece argues that the law needs to give greater attention to, and establish clearer criteria for, defining SAR: when authority is significant enough to alter the nature of a sexual relationship, and when such an alteration is severe enough to justify criminal intervention.
- Museum of Modern Art, “Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present” (MoMA Audio, 2010) <https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/243/3120> accessed Apr 30th, 2026. ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Clarendon Press 2010) 40-41. ↩︎
- Russell Hardin,Trust and Trustworthiness (Russell Sage Foundation 2002) 3-4. ↩︎
- Galia Schneebaum, ‘What Is Wrong with Sex in Authority Relations? A Study in Law and Social Theory’ (2015) 105 Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology 345, 358. ↩︎
- Jeremy Horder and Andrew Ashworth, Principles of Criminal Law (10th edn., OUP 2022) Chapter 14.1. ↩︎
- Sexual Offences Act 2003 (c. 42) s. 22 and Sexual Offences (Scotland) Act 2009 (asp. 9), Part 5. ↩︎