by Claude Opus 5.5
What would a feminist ethics of care demand of institutions that procedural approaches miss? Is there a risk that care-based approaches become paternalistic towards complainants?
Most public discussion of the case behind these seminars has been about process: whether the police investigation was adequate, whether the decision not to prosecute was sound, whether the university hearing was fair, whether sanctions were proportionate. These are questions of justice in the procedural sense, concerned with rules, rights, evidence and outcomes. The feminist ethics of care, developed by thinkers such as Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings, Joan Tronto, Virginia Held and Eva Feder Kittay, offers a different starting point. It begins not with abstract rights and impartial rules but with relationships, dependency, vulnerability and the concrete needs of particular people. Asking what care would demand of institutions brings into view things that procedural approaches tend to miss, but it also raises a familiar worry: that care can slide into control.
What procedural approaches miss
A procedural approach asks whether the right process was followed and whether it reached a defensible result. Those are important questions, and care ethicists do not dismiss them. But procedural thinking tends to treat the people involved primarily as parties: a complainant and respondents whose claims must be adjudicated. It is less attentive to several things.
Needs beyond the verdict. A person who reports sexual violence may need safety, medical and psychological support, academic adjustments, help with housing, and a sense that she is not alone. These needs exist regardless of what a hearing eventually finds, and they arise immediately, while procedures take months. A process can be scrupulously fair and still leave someone isolated and unsupported.
Time and continuity. Procedures have beginnings and ends. Care is ongoing. The complainant in this case reported in 2024; the university hearing concluded in 2025; a civil suit was filed in 2026 and the criminal case has been reopened. From a procedural point of view these are separate events. From the point of view of the person living through them, they are one continuous experience, and an institution that cares would attend to that continuity.
The whole web of relationships. Procedural approaches focus on the parties. A care perspective also notices others affected: friends who supported the complainant, students in the same residence or classes as the respondents, members of the fraternity who were not accused, the wider student body, the family wrongly harassed after a misidentification. Each of these people stands in some relationship to the institution, and care asks what they need.
Prevention and anticipation. Tronto distinguishes phases of care: caring about, which involves noticing needs; taking care of, which involves assuming responsibility; care-giving, the actual work; and care-receiving, which involves checking whether care has met the need. The first phase, attentiveness, implies that institutions should notice vulnerability before harm occurs. A university that knew about the risks associated with fraternity parties and did not act failed at the first phase of care, whatever its procedures later did.
Care for respondents. Care ethics is not partisan. Students accused of serious wrongdoing are also members of the community and may face isolation, public exposure and threats, especially once named. Caring for them does not mean excusing them; it means recognising that they too are people in relationships, with needs that procedural adjudication does not address.
The risk of paternalism
The worry about paternalism is real. Care involves judgments about what others need, and those judgments can override what people actually want. Institutional history provides examples. Policies that require nearly all university employees to report any disclosure of sexual violence to a central office were introduced partly to protect students, but they have been criticised for removing complainants’ control over whether and when to report. Students who confide in a trusted professor may find that an investigation has begun without their consent. Similarly, approaches that treat every complainant as fragile, or that steer complainants towards particular outcomes, can deny them agency at a moment when their agency has already been violated.
Paternalism is especially troubling in sexual violence cases because the core wrong is the overriding of someone’s will. An institutional response that again decides for the complainant what will happen to her body, her story or her case can feel like a repetition of that wrong.
Care ethics’ own resources against paternalism
Care ethicists have anticipated this objection. Tronto’s fourth phase, care-receiving, exists precisely to check whether care is meeting the needs of the person cared for, as they experience them. Care that ignores the response of the person receiving it is, on Tronto’s account, defective care. Noddings emphasises engrossment: attending to the other person as they are, not as we imagine them. And many care ethicists draw on the idea of relational autonomy, developed by philosophers such as Catriona Mackenzie and Natalie Stoljar, according to which autonomy is not the absence of dependence but a capacity that is supported and developed through relationships. On this view, good care strengthens a person’s ability to make their own choices, rather than substituting for it.
In practical terms, this suggests an institutional ethic in which complainants are given information, options and support, but decisions about whether to pursue formal processes remain, as far as possible, theirs. It suggests that support services should be available independently of any investigation, so that seeking help does not commit anyone to a process. And it suggests that institutions should ask complainants, and respondents, what they need, rather than assuming.
Conclusion
A feminist ethics of care would demand that institutions attend to needs as well as rights, to continuity as well as decisions, to the wider community as well as the parties, and to prevention as well as response. It would ask whether people were supported, not only whether they were treated fairly. The risk of paternalism is real, but it is a risk of bad care, not of care as such. Care properly understood is responsive to the person cared for, and in the context of sexual violence, that means restoring and respecting the complainant’s control over her own life. Procedures that are fair but indifferent, and care that is warm but controlling, both fall short. An institution that took care seriously would try to be neither.