Moral Injury from the Battlefield to Remote Warfare and Online Child Sex Crime Investigation
Date: Wednesday 1 July, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location: Online (Microsoft Teams)
Speaker: Professor Peter Lee, Professor of Applied Ethics and Co-Director of the University of Portsmouth Centre for Defence, Risk and Resilience.
This NABS+ Seminar has come out of the Wellbeing at Work Community of Practice
Abstract
Moral injury emerged from clinical work with American military veterans who returned from the Vietnam War and describes the psychological, social and spiritual harm that can follow witnessing, perpetrating, or failing to prevent acts that violate deeply held moral beliefs. Moral injury can also be compounded by a sense of betrayal by commanders or by an individual’s institution. This presentation traces the concept from its military origins into two contemporary settings: RAF Reaper drone operations and police online child sex crime investigation. In Reaper crews, moral injury is explored through the ethical and emotional burden of lethal remote warfare, including responsibility, agency, surveillance intimacy, killing at distance, and the cumulative effects of operational exposure. In police investigators, moral injury is examined through repeated confrontation with child sexual abuse material, the strain of inhabiting “two worlds,” fears of contamination, burnout, changes in identity, and reliance on peer, family, and organisational support. Together, these cases show moral injury as a distinct form of occupational harm requiring explicit recognition and support.
About the Speaker
Professor Peter Lee, Professor of Applied Ethics, is Co-Director of the University of Portsmouth Centre for Defence, Risk and Resilience. His research has spanned the politics and ethics of war, the ethical, operational and other human aspects of UK Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (drone) operations, the ethics of AI and autonomous weapon systems, and moral injury and mental harms experienced by military and police personnel. In 2020 Peter led a CREST-funded project which explored moral injury in police online child sex crime investigators and RAF Reaper (drone) operators. In 2022 he undertook a national survey of police child sex crime investigators’ mental health and moral injury in partnership with the Policing Institute in the Eastern Region (PIER) at Anglia Ruskin University: ‘Understanding the impacts of Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation (CSAE) investigations.’ In 2024/25 he collaborated with colleagues at the Durham University International Centre for Moral Injury and at Southampton University on a project to explore mental health, wellbeing and moral injury in military chaplains and civilian clergy. He is currently a member of the Ministry of Defence Artificial Intelligence Ethics Advisory Panel.