Transformation beyond reform? Abolitionist thinking and institutional responses to harm in political legislatives

How can we address injustices that occur within political institutions without bringing new forms of injustice into being? What role do formal accountability frameworks, like complaint processes, play in redressing harm, and for whom do these actually work? Can complaint systems ever address complainant’s needs, or do they primarily function to mitigate reputational damage to the institution? This paper draws on abolitionist thinking about institutional responses to harm to examine some findings from my postdoctoral research project. This project uses feminist institutional ethnography to examine how political institutions deal with sexual and racial misconduct. In this paper, I focus on the UK Parliament’s Independent Complaints and Grievance Scheme (ICGS), an independent mechanism set up in 2018 for handling serious misconduct complaints (including bullying, harassment or sexual misconduct) across both the Commons and Lords. The ICGS was the first complaint scheme of its type in any legislature globally and has undergone significant changes since its conception. Its existence owes much to the women complainants who made public their experiences of sexual misconduct, bullying and other harassment on the parliamentary estate. In the past year, the ICGS investigation of complaints has developed an approach that aligns with ‘trauma-informed principles’. This paper combines textual and interview analysis to examine this shifting institutional response to serious misconduct and its evolving accountability structures. I seek to understand how harms emerge across different registers (emotional, discursive, and embodied) within political institutions and how these harms manifest differently according to existing intersecting inequalities. I conclude the paper with reflections on how this research approach enables different questions to be asked about institutional responses to harm; questions that go beyond reformist agendas.