The Challenge of Bioinequality: Addressing the Health Impact of Unequal Treatment Through Law

Global social movements for justice have called for better legal responses to the harms of inequality. These inequalities have traditionally been dealt with in the political sphere and legal measures to address them have taken little account of emerging knowledge about the biological impact of unequal treatment. We use the concept ‘bioinequalities’ to foreground the relationship increasingly articulated in studies that show that social stress and trauma associated with unequal treatment have a significant epigenetic and intergenerational impact on the body. This article proposes a way to address the health harms that result from inequality by drawing on the existing concept of the ‘hostile environment’ in sexual harassment jurisprudence in Australia. Our ‘bioinequality’ approach focuses on the way that inequality operates in and as a hostile and harmful environment for the embodied and embedded beings that live in it. We examine the possibilities of using the concept of a hostile environment to more effectively address discriminatory harms alongside a positive duty to create non-hostile environments. In so doing we offer a broader, bioscientifically informed approach that can inform equality laws in other jurisdictions.