R-Parity Violation and Unification

The reported anomaly in deep-inelastic scattering at HERA has revived interest in the phenomenology of R-parity violation. From the theoretical point of view, the existence of R-violating interactions poses two considerable problems. The first one concerns the flavour structure of the interactions and the origin of an appropriate suppression of flavour-changing neutral-current processes and lepton-family transitions. The second one concerns the way of embedding R-violating interactions in a grand unified theory (GUT) without introducing unacceptable nucleon decay rates. We show that the second problem can be solved by a mechanism which is purely group theoretical and does not rely on details of the flavour theory. We construct explicit GUT models in which our mechanism can be realized.