By Dr Alice King, Senior Researcher
In March 2025, the Legal Services Research Centre launched their first annual Lawyer Census. Lawyers were asked about several key issues facing the profession, including experiences of sexual harassment during the course of their work.
The results have been published in a new report, Sexual Harassment: Findings from the Victorian Lawyer Census 2025. The report contains a number of key insights into how, when and in what forms sexual harassment is experienced and witnessed across the profession.
Five years on: what has changed?
In 2019, the VLSB+C conducted research on sexual harassment across the profession, working directly with the 2019 data, the LSRC has been able to show what, if anything, has changed since 2019.
Despite various initiatives across the sector in the years between the two studies, little has changed, as illustrated in the graph below.
An everyday experience underpinned by power and vulnerability
As in society more broadly, sexual harassment within the Victorian legal profession is a gendered experience – with young women experiencing it at considerably elevated rates. Marginalised groups, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander lawyers, LGBTQIA+ lawyers and those with long-term illnesses or disabilities, also all experienced higher rates of sexual harassment.
Lower-level forms of sexual harassment were more prominent than more serious forms, in keeping with broader societal patterns. Sexually suggestive comments and jokes emerged as the most common form of harassment, affecting nearly half of those who experienced any harassment. Inappropriate staring and leering affected 29%, while unwanted touching affected 19%. More severe forms, including non-consensual sexual activity, remained comparatively rare but were not absent from the profession.
‘Pointless’ reporting
Despite harassment affecting 1 in 3 lawyers (over their careers to date), 84% did not make any formal complaint about their most recent incident. Focussing on the past 12 months, only 9% of those who were harassed made a formal report.
Many described sexual harassment as normalised within legal workplaces, as ‘just part of the job’, making complaints feel futile. Concerns about career repercussions also featured prominently, with respondents indicating that reporting ‘could place [my] career in jeopardy’, or be a ‘career limiting move’. Young lawyers felt particularly vulnerable, with one noting ‘the reputational impact for an early career lawyer would be impossible to come back from’.
Not only is this alarming, it also raises broader questions about access to justice and the adequacy of legal mechanisms that exist to deal with sexual harassment.
What next?
Sexual harassment across the legal profession is cultural and systemic, requiring co-ordinated action across the sector, with collaboration between regulatory and professional bodies key.
Sexual harassment is not a ‘bad apple’ problem with a simple solution but rather a systemic failure underpinned by a tolerant and accepting culture which will require collective accountability and sustained institutional investment. Effective change may be slow, as attitudes and behaviours cannot be shifted overnight, but with continued commitment and empirically validated interventions, strides can be made towards eradicating sexual harassment from the Victorian legal profession.