Key details
Dr Megan Johnson
Lecturer in Law
Megan Johnson has been a Lecturer in Law at the University of Greenwich since 2024. Prior to joining the School of Law, Megan was undertaking her PhD in Law at the University of Bristol funded by a scholarship. While completing her doctoral thesis, Megan taught Criminal Law, Criminal Evidence, and International Criminal Law at the University of Bristol and the University of Southampton.
Megan is an interdisciplinary sexual violence scholar whose work is informed by Black and indigenous feminist theory and critical race theory. Routinely, the problem of rape is weaponised by political and legal actors in ways that perpetuate racialised myths and narratives which, in turn, undermines the efficacy of rape law’s operationalisation. To locate and challenge this, her research primarily evaluates the role of race in English and Welsh rape law and criminal justice responses thereto. She has also published in other areas of gender-based violence including domestic violence, sexual violence in conflict, image-based sexual abuse, human trafficking, and abusive pornography.
Responsibilities within the university
- Lecturer in Criminal Law
- Lecturer in Advanced Criminal Law
- Co-module lead for International Criminal Law
- Co-module lead for Law of Evidence
- Project lead for the Innocence Project London
Research / Scholarly interests
Member of Centre for Communities and Social Justice.
Megan’s research and teaching reflect a primary interest in interdisciplinary approaches to criminal law – particularly rape and serious sexual crimes – through the humanities and the arts. By compounding a range of disciplines including law, literature, history, sociology, psychology, and philosophy, her work develops a creative, novel, and nuanced anti-rape praxis that is explicitly attentive to race and grounded in anti-racist theory. This approach not only interrogates the racialised dimensions of sexual violence and legal responses to it, but also seeks to challenge and transform the structural inequalities that shape survivors’ experiences and access to justice.
Recent publications
Johnson, M. (2025). (How) does the myth of the Black rapist feature in English and Welsh rape law? Doctoral Thesis, University of Bristol
Johnson, M. (2021). Eviction as a safeguard against domestic violence. EHRLR, 1, 117-120.
Johnson, M. (2021). Procedural flaws leave child sexual abuse victim without legal protection. EHRLR, 5, 569-572.
Johnson, M. (2022). Systematic police failures to protect victims of domestic violence. European Human Rights Law Review, 2, 194-198.
Presentations
- 2025 - Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA), University of Liverpool
“(How) does the myth of the Black rapist feature in English and Welsh rape law? – A Law and Literature Enquiry” - 2023 - Centre of Law and History, University of Bristol
“Writing Workshop Presentation: How to incorporate interdisciplinary methodologies into criminal law research”. - 2022 - Stefan Cross Centre for Women and Equality, University of Southampton
“The Translocation of Racialised Rape Mythmaking from the British colonies to the United Kingdom: Distilling race, Empire, and British colonialism in the ‘real rape’ myth and its application”. - 2022 - Law and Society Association (LSA), University of Lisbon
“Why does race feature in the operationalisation of rape law but not in the law itself? – A critique of cultural scaffolding”. - 2022 - Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA), University of York
“The Myth of the Black Rapist in a US Context – A (Limited?) a Tool to Understand Rape Law in the UK