Anika Gray’s research and writing focuses primarily on gender and the law, criminal law, Commonwealth Caribbean human rights and international human rights law with a specific emphasis on legal and institutional response to gender-based violence and sexual and reproductive health rights.

Gray’s research on legal and institutional response to sexual violence in the Commonwealth Caribbean is illustrated through three research articles. 

The Role of Sexual Offence Courts in Furthering the Feminist Project of Eliminating Women’s Subordination (2022) is a book chapter in Critical Caribbean Perspectives on Preventing Gender-Based Violence (edited by Ramona Biholar & Dacia L Leslie), which examines how feminist legal theory and strategy influenced the procedures of the specialised sexual offence courts in Antigua and Barbuda and Guyana. It also illustrates how these specialised courts are beneficial to the extent that they increase survivor participation and offender accountability but can potentially have a negative impact on women’s agency and reinforce systems of oppression, which are antithetical to the overarching feminist agenda of eradicating patriarchy. 

In her Women’s Right Law Reporter article, Using Restorative Justice to Respond to Statutory Rape Cases Involving a" Willing" Adolescent Girl and an Adult Male in Jamaica (2023), Gray advocates for using restorative justice (RJ) as one alternative response to sexual offences that is also aligned with the feminist agenda of eliminating sexual exploitation and abuse of women and girls. She presents an RJ model that addresses statutory rape’s underlying causes, empowers victim-survivors without dehumanizing those responsible for the harm and answers the concerns of critics who argue that RJ processes compromise victim-survivor safety, reinforces power imbalances and is a soft approach to crime that has no deterrent effect.  

Finally, in Protecting Women’s Right to Equality – The Imperative to Regulate “Deepfake Porn” and Other Non-Consensual Sexual Images (NCSI) in the Commonwealth Caribbean, which is awaiting publication, Gray uses Sandra Fredman’s substantive equality framework to identify the harms of Deepfake sexual abuse as well as proposes potential reforms grounded in States’ treaty and constitutional obligations and lessons learned from legislative efforts in other jurisdictions. The article ultimately concludes that effective regulation of Deepfake sexual abuse requires, inter alia, multi-jurisdictional enforcement, survivor-centred response and individual and corporate accountability.

Gray is currently working on research that uses Rebecca Smyth’s concept of “abortion exceptionalism in international human rights law” to demonstrate the limitations of using international human rights jurisprudence to argue for decriminalisation of abortion access in domestic courts in the Commonwealth Caribbean. Additionally, she is engaged in research that investigates the ways in which artificial intelligence drive, enable, simulate and normalise sexual violence against women and girls in the Commonwealth Caribbean through the creation and distribution of non-consensual sexualised images.