Dr Claire Bessant is a socio-legal scholar and Associate Professor at Northumbria University. She is a Fellow at the civil society organisation CONNECTED by DATA and also sits on the Society of Legal Scholars Executive Committee.
Claire joined Northumbria University’s School of Law in 2002 having previously worked as a solicitor specialising in family law. She has since published in the fields of family law, privacy law, data protection, information sharing and human rights, and has contributed to government and parliamentary consultations, on both privacy and domestic abuse. At Northumbria, Claire is a member of and part of the management group of Northumbria's Gender, Violence and Abuse Interdisciplinary Research Theme. Given her interests within and beyond the legal discipline, Claire has membership of both the Socio-Legal Studies Association and the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR). Claire has also been appointed to the ESRC, AHRC and UKRI Peer Review Colleges.
Claire’s teaching currently focuses upon information law (including data protection and access to environmental information ). Claire is PGR Lead for Northumbria Law School and Ethics lead for Northumbria Law School.
Claire is particularly interested in the impact of technology upon children's privacy. Claire's research on 'sharenting' (a term used when parents share information about their children online) and the legal remedies afforded to children in England was published in Communications Law in 2018. Her consideration with Dr Maximillian Schnebbe of the application of the UKGDPR and EUGDPR to the phenomenon of sharenting was published in Datenschutz und Datensicherheit in 2022. During 2021-2 Claire worked with an international, interdisciplinary team of academics to develop further understanding of the sharenting phenomenon, the benefits that sharenting brings and the risks that it poses, with a view to identifying further avenues for research and developing policy recommendations: see “Sharenting in an Evolving Digital World: Increasing Online Connection and Consumer Vulnerability” Recognising that adults other than parents, and particularly educators, also play a key role in sharing children's information online, more recently Claire has explored School social media use and its impact upon children's rights to privacy and autonomy
Claire's research also explores how family privacy impacts upon the law in practice. Family privacy is here understood as an ideology which protects the family from the intervention of state and society and enables the family (notably parents) to take decisions about the family and children’s upbringing. Claire's doctoral thesis titled 'Parental Views about the Importance of Family Privacy and its Protection in English Law'used empirical methods to explore parents’ understanding of family privacy and the laws protecting such privacy. The thesis proposed a new framework for understanding the relationship between family, state and society and a new definition of family privacy which reflects both how parents understand the term and jurisprudential views on the family and how it should be protected from state and society. Claire's thesis findings have been published in abridged form in the leading family law journal Child and Family Law Quarterly ('Twenty-First Century Family Privacy' 2023 CFLQ 35(3) 251-274). Claire is currently working on a monograph, to be published by Routledge, Family Law, Privacy and Ideology, which will explore the application of this framework in practice, and consider how the law currently operates to protect the family's privacy from state, individuals and big tech.
Claire's research on family privacy has been used to provide a new perspective to discussions regarding children's privacy, online harms, and the role parents and Government should play in protecting children from such harms (Parental approaches to protecting children from online harm: Trust, Protectionism or Dialogue? in Setty, Gordon and Nottingham, Children, Young People and Online Harms Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). Again, focused on the role parents play in protecting children from online harm, Claire has been acting as co-lead on an international collaboration which used online surveys to exploring US and UK parents' awareness of dark design, an intentionally deceptive user interface designed to manipulate users, including children, into certain behaviours, including the sharing of their personal information (see Dark patterns online and the role of parents and Exploring parents' knowledge of dark design and its impact on children's digital wellbeing) https://spir.aoir.org/ojs/index.php/spir/article/view/13395).
In 2020-21 Claire formed part of the Observatory for the Monitoring for Data-Driven Approaches to Covid-19 (OMDDAC), a collaboration between Northumbria University & the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), funded by AHRC to research data-driven approaches to Covid-19. Claire led on OMDDAC's research with young people which asked 'Are young people aware of how data (including their own personal data) has been used during the pandemic and if so, what views do they hold about its use?' The findings and recommendations drawn from this research are now available in the European Journal of Law and Technology: Children, Public Sector Data-Driven Decision-Making and Article 12 UNCRC
Alongside her research on privacy and technology, Claire maintains an interest in how the state protects vulnerable victims from domestic abuse, and in particular the role civil protection orders play in this regard. Claire is also currently collaborating on an empirical research exploring educators' understanding of the legal obligations imposed upon them where children are at risk of/have suffered female genital mutilation, again using family privacy as a lens through which to explore the state's role in protecting vulnerable family members.
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