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Law faculties function as formative institutions where future legal professionals are trained. Today’s law students are tomorrow’s lawyers, judges, prosecutors, academics, and world leaders. Besides being training grounds, law faculties are also the primary sites where these upcoming legal professionals are socially and ethically conditioned. Conversely, the culture in the legal profession permeates legal education, influencing academic culture and campus culture. Both spaces, therefore, reproduce similar hierarchies of power and suffer from fragmented and ineffective reporting mechanisms. The result is a system in which accountability is diffused, and harm is normalized across institutional boundaries. Students, interns and pupils are the most vulnerable within this structure. This article highlights the peculiar plight of interns and pupils who are in a liminal space, somewhere in between being law students and legal professionals.
Recent allegations of sexual harassment within Kenya’s legal profession have exposed not only misconduct, but deeper structural failures in how the profession regulates power and accountability. What is emerging within Kenya’s legal profession cannot be separated from how future lawyers are trained. Patterns of power, silence, and vulnerability appear early in legal education and persist into practice. This article argues that the dynamics emerging in the legal profession are reproduced much earlier in law schools where future lawyers are trained and socialized into the profession.
From the classroom to the courtroom
Law faculties are not isolated academic spaces. They are formative institutions where professional identities are shaped. In Kenya, this connection is especially pronounced because many lecturers are also practising advocates, moving between courtrooms and classrooms. This dual role means that professional norms do not simply enter legal education, they are actively reproduced within it.
Recent public statements by the Law Society of Kenya (LSK), protests by young lawyers, and public debate on sexual harassment in the profession point to a deeper structural concern. This is the persistence of abuse of power within legal practice. But the question is not only what is happening in practice. It is also how these patterns are already being normalised during legal training.
Sexual Harassment in the Profession: Emerging Patterns
In February 2026, the Law Society of Kenya, in the above-mentioned public statements, acknowledged allegations of widespread sexual harassment within the profession, particularly affecting interns, pupils, and junior associates. The statements also revealed an important reality; that many of the complaints surfaced first on social media rather than through formal disciplinary channels. This admission is significant because it suggests that the survivors did not initially turn to formal institutional channels for redress. Instead, they resorted to public platforms. Social media should not function as the de facto reporting mechanism of professional misconduct within a regulated profession.
While the statements do not reveal the reasons why the reports were made on social media, this could imply multiple possibilities. It could be that the survivors lacked confidence with the available channels and opted not to utilize them. It could also be that they in fact utilized the available channels but justice was not forthcoming through those channels, or that the channels were not available to them in the first place, forcing them to turn to social media as the only other avenue that would realize them justice. Whichever one of these is the real reason, these developments raise an important structural question: Why are formal mechanisms not being used, trusted, or accessed?
The persistence of these allegations is especially troubling considering that the Society adopted the Sexual Harassment and Anti-Bullying (SHAB) Policy of 2019. The policy cites the Advocates Disciplinary Tribunal and the Advocates Complaints Commission as the structures available to lodge complaints. However, for such complaints to be surfacing seven years after the adoption of the policy raises important questions about the policy itself as well as the implementation, accessibility, and effectiveness of the profession’s existing frameworks. Indeed, the statement notes that the Tribunal held that it lacked jurisdiction to determine a matter which had been filed before it, citing that the nature of the offence, being criminal, necessitated the use of criminal justice channels. The result is a system in which visibility is achieved and justice is pursued not through institutional reporting, but through public exposure.
Why reporting fails both in law schools and in practice
One pattern is consistent across both legal education and the profession: formal reporting mechanisms are underused. Students in my research described lack of awareness of reporting structures, fear of victimization, distrust in institutional response, and reliance on informal or external channels.
Several participants indicated that they would be reluctant to report incidents of sexual misconduct through formal institutional channels. When asked whether they would complain of sexual misconduct, one of them indicated, “(…) I equally would not have complained.”
Another said, “I would not have complained, I will not lie… I don’t think I would. Because (…) I have not seen anything being done to curtail such situations ever happening. I don’t even trust the school itself and the administration, and how it works. So why complain to them?”
Some even suggested that formal reporting is futile, and that public exposure is more effective than institutional complaint.
“Well, I think for me, I would not complain to the university. But maybe I would do like an exposé. I think nowadays people go public about things. So you just (…) place a camera somewhere. Because I know the school won’t help me. I might report yes, but such kind of a thing won’t happen. But you have seen cases of exposés, like, for example, BBC exposés helping people.”
Critically, these views do not merely connote disengagement. They signal an erosion of trust in institutional structures.
The issue is not only specific to Kenyan students. At Makerere University in Uganda, students have previously adopted undercover measures to expose sexual abuse on campus because they believed that the university’s formal structures did not offer justice in a fair and timely manner. The case that prompted the Vice Chancellor to appoint a special committee to investigate sexual harassment resulted from an exposé by an investigative report aired on television on 26 February 2018.
The holding by the Tribunal that it lacked jurisdiction on the basis that sexual harassment is a criminal offence raises an important question for legal education: If the profession’s own disciplinary structures report to be lacking in jurisdiction, how confidently are the reporting avenues within law schools dealing with similar allegations? This can only be answered by the institutions themselves. The current moment in the legal profession reflects precisely the dynamic my research identified to exist in law faculties.
The persistence of these challenges points to the existing mismatch between formal policy and lived reality. Even where policies exist, they are often poorly communicated, inconsistently applied or perceived as inaccessible. The effect is a system that exists on paper but is bypassed in practice. This is where the continuity between legal education and the profession becomes most visible. The same reluctance to report, the same fear of retaliation, and the same reliance on informal exposure appears in both spaces.
Pupils and interns: Most vulnerable
In the legal sector, the pupils and interns occupy the most precarious position. They are caught up in a liminal space, being neither fully students nor fully advocates.
Pupillage in Kenya is a mandatory stage before admission to the Bar, placing candidates under the supervision of senior advocates whose evaluation determines their professional future. This creates an inherent power imbalance because the arrangement places pupils in a position of considerable dependence on their pupil master. Where misconduct or harassment originates from the pupil master supervising the student, reporting such behaviour may feel particularly risky, as the pupil’s progression to admission to the Bar remains tied to the successful completion of this supervisory relationship. In such conditions, silence is not passive. It is strategic survival.
Critically, even if the Advocates’ Disciplinary Tribunal and the Advocate’s Complaints Commission were to assume jurisdiction over claims of sexual misconduct, it would still appear very difficult for pupils and interns to utilize these channels. The very use of the term “Advocate” to describe these structures, as instituted by a profession that they are yet to formally join, may create the impression that these mechanisms are not designed with them in mind. Since they occupy a more precarious position in the legal field, they may perceive themselves as existing at the margins of these mechanisms.
In addition, the pupillage experience has been criticized as being one that is too burdensome for students, demanding excessive intellectual as well as manual labour and often with no pay or pay that is very minimal and not commensurate with the work. Some pupils earn as little as KSh10,000 per month. Low pay and limited recognition can lead one to question their sense of worth and belonging in any profession, not to mention when they are still interning. On the other hand, adequate compensation can be a great source of dignity, respect, value, and belonging. When these are lacking, interns and pupils may feel marginalized and peripheral in the profession, making it all the more difficult for them to utilize the available structures.
In addition to them being affected the most, it is clear that pupils and interns are the ones most encumbered by the inadequacies in the reporting systems. A case of double trouble.
Sexual harassment in the legal profession cannot be understood in isolation from legal education. The two are part of a continuous system in which hierarchy, silence, and dependency are reproduced. What emerges is not only a disciplinary challenge, but a structural one. The issue requires rebuilding trust in reporting mechanisms, confronting entrenched hierarchies, and recognizing that law schools are not separate from the profession. They are its first site of socialization. Without this recognition, the cycle will continue: from lecture hall to law firm, from silence to exposure, and from exposure back to silence again.
Additionally, it requires policy reform. The pressing policy issue concerns the fragmentation of accountability pathways across criminal law, professional discipline, and institutional regulation. In practice, each system appears capable of deferring responsibility to another. The result is not legal ambiguity, but institutional avoidance. A clear decision needs to be made on whether sexual misconduct should strictly be addressed using criminal justice systems or whether the disciplinary mechanisms within the profession and in legal education can handle these.
