VULNERABILITY & POLICING - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Professor at Helen Bader School of Social Welfare
Amy Watson is a professor at Helen Bader School of Social Welfare at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. For the past two decades, her research has focused on police encounters with people with mental illnesses and the Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) model.
Amy has also conducted research and provided consultation to programs serving people with mental illnesses with criminal legal system involvement. These include CIT programs, mental health courts and prison re-entry programs. She served on the CIT International Board of Directors from 2016-2021, as President of the Board 2020-2021.
Earlier in her career, Amy worked as a probation officer on a team serving clients with serious mental illnesses and as a Forensic Social Worker/Mitigation Specialist working on death penalty cases. She has a BA in Criminal Justice from Aurora University and an AM and PhD from the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Global City Policing at the Jill Dando Institute of Security
Ben Bradford is Professor of Global City Policing at the Jill Dando Institute of Security and Crime Science, University College London, where he is also Director of the Centre for Global City Policing.
Ben's research interests include public trust, police legitimacy, cooperation and compliance in justice settings, and social identity as a factor in all these processes. He has also published on organisational justice within police agencies, ethnic and other disparities in policing, and elements of public-facing police work such as neighbourhood patrol, community engagement and stop and search.
Ben's contribution to the Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre will focus on questions of trust, legitimacy and public attitudes towards policing priorities and potential changes to the focus of police. Some of these questions include:
If we want to ‘do policing differently' is this likely to find public support or opposition?
Can people be convinced that change is needed, and if so what do they think needs to be changed?
What might be the effect of a significant shift in police activity on trust and legitimacy?
Professor Corinne May-Chahal is an applied social scientist dedicated to research that improves the way in which children and young people can keep safe and feel secure in a rapidly changing socio-technical world. Her work involves developing and applying new technologies with colleagues in computing, criminology, law, psychology and sociology in partnership with industry, the public sector and law enforcement.
Corinne's research has involved creating software to identify age and gender deception in computer-mediated communication. She has also co-produced applications to facilitate the reporting of community concern and computational tools to support the police in identifying child sexual abuse image sharing.
As Chair of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) Guideline Development Group on Child Abuse, Corinne is committed to evidence-informed practice. For example, she completed an IICSA funded rapid evidence assessment on the characteristics, vulnerabilities and support needed for victims of online-facilitated child sexual abuse and exploitation. Building on this, in her latest book ‘Online Child Sexual Victimisation‘ she proposes an ‘asset-based approach' to childhood security. This identifies social assets that are threatened by online harms (such as trust in online services, economic security, freedom of association, freedom from discrimination and violence) and recommends online and offline practices to reinforce these assets.
Corinne will lead on taking forward this approach within the ESRC Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre. Focusing initially on one local authority area, working with postdoctoral researchers Dr Christine Weirich and Larissa Engelmann, the project team aims to co-develop a framework to help prevent online child sexual victimisation (OCSV) within the community. OCSV is not just an online problem; images are generated offline and the effects are felt offline long into the future. The research team will work with the communities to answer questions such as:
How do we keep our understanding of the problem up to date as the technology changes?
Are we tackling the problem offline as well as we could be?
What would an ideal response would look like?
What do we need to achieve such a response? And how will we know?
David Gadd is Professor of Criminology at the University of Manchester.
David's expertise spans the fields of psychosocial criminology, masculinities and crime, hate crime, gender-based violence and modern slavery. He has previously led a number of major projects. These include Mapping the Contours of Human Trafficking for the N8 Policing Partnership and the ESRC-funded From Boys to Men Project which looked at what can be done to stop young men becoming perpetrators of domestic violence in later life. He also led the European Commission-funded ReADaPt Project that examined domestic abuse prevention and education across Europe, as well as an ESRC-funded study on the perpetrators of racially motivated crime and a Scottish Executive-funded study on male victims of domestic abuse.
David's most recent books include Young Men and Domestic Abuse and Demystifying Modern Slavery. He serves on Greater Manchester Combined Authority's Gender-Based Violence Board, and played a key role in drafting the ten year strategy which that board is implementing.
Over the next five years David will lead one stand of research (with Dr Rose Broad) investigating what can be learnt from criminal cases to inform a more preventative approach to modern slavery; and another charting the emergence of ‘whole systems approach' to domestic abuse in Greater Manchester that is sensitive to the vulnerabilities of both offenders and victims.
Job Titles:
- Co - Investigator, Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre / University of Sheffield
- Professor of Policing and Social Justice at the University of York
Adam is Professor of Policing and Social Justice at the University of York and Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Leeds. In 2013, he established and was the inaugural Director of the N8 Policing Research Partnership (N8 PRP, 2013-20); a collaboration between eight universities and policing partners across the north of England.
Alongside the ESRC Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre, Adam is currently working on a European Commission Horizon 2020 project IcARUS: ‘Innovative Approaches to Urban Security' (2020-24). In this project he led the research and production of the State of the Art Review and Roadmap that will inform the co-design and implementation of innovative approaches to urban security in the six partner cities.
He is Chair of the Departmental Research Committee in York Law School. From 2015-21, he was Director of the Leeds Social Sciences Institute (LSSI) which supports interdisciplinary research development, fosters external engagement and research impact and promotes skills and social methods training across the University of Leeds and PI on the ESRC Impact Acceleration Account grant (£1.3m), the largest in the UK.
He is a member of the new Police Scientific Advisory Council, which provides independent advice to the National Police Chiefs' Council in the UK on science, technology, analysis and research matters relevant to policing policy and operations. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and an Honorary Lifetime member of the British Society of Criminology.
Since 2016, Adam has been a Senior Lecturer in Criminology in the School of Law, University of Sheffield. Before arriving in Sheffield, he was a Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer in Public Policy in the Department of Politics, University of York. He has also spent time as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Washington (Seattle) and a researcher for Gun Free South Africa (Cape Town) and Demos (London).
Adam's research focuses on three interconnected themes:
The rise of the private security and private military industries in the post-war era;
Corresponding issues of governance, regulation and legitimacy in the security and military sectors;
The changing nature of state-market relations.
Over the past decade, he has published 30 journal articles and book chapters on the privatisation of criminal justice and defence as well as one book, ‘The Politics of Private Security: Regulation, Reform and Re-Legitimation'.
In his work with the Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre, Adam is working primarily on the Bradford Mapping project. The aim of the project is to explore organisational interactions and outcomes from the perspective of practitioners and the lived realities of service recipients. It is hoped that this will lead to a better understanding of vulnerability conditions and service responses, as well as the compounding and interdependent effects of interactions between vulnerabilities and services. The project team are working with a range of local partners to derive insight from, and add value to, the Connected Yorkshire research database to co-produce research that informs improvement to services that better meet the needs of vulnerable groups and reduce harm.
Job Titles:
- Co - Investigator
- Senior Lecturer ( Associate Professor
Dr Joanne Bretherton is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Social Policy and Criminology, based in the School of Business and Society at the University of York. She is an expert on women's homelessness, homelessness, domestic abuse and housing precarity. Her current work centres on evaluations of the introduction of Housing First services across the UK, strategies to understand and alleviate women's homelessness and interventions for women at risk of homelessness due to gender-based (domestic) violence.
During almost 20 years of research she has led or co-led around 35 research projects with funders including central and devolved Government(s), research councils, international bodies and homelessness and domestic abuse charities. Joanne's work on women's experience of homelessness, specifically, has global recognition and she is frequently invited to contribute to discussions on the topic nationally and internationally.
In her work with the ESRC Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre, expanding the homelessness parameters of enquiry away from rough sleeping to accommodation settings, Joanne will look at how people that are homeless interact with the Police in these environments. Much less is known about policing interactions with the much larger population of homeless people who live across a range of settings such as in emergency overnight accommodation, hostels, Housing First tenancies or supported accommodation, despite the fact they often share similar vulnerabilities such as substance misuse, mental and physical ill-health, experiences of domestic and sexual abuse and have frequent interactions with the criminal justice system. This will be applied through a gendered lens with the experience of women highlighted.
Job Titles:
- Lecturer
- Co - Investigator, Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre / University of Leeds
Laura Bainbridge is a Lecturer in Criminal Justice at the University of Leeds. Her scholarly interests lie at the nexus between social policy, criminology and political science. She specialises in violence reduction and the multi-level processes in which policies and programmes ‘travel' across the globe. Laura is the founder and chair of the UK Compulsory Sobriety Network and sits on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Social Policy. She is also a member of the Howard League for Penal Reform's Research Advisory Group, and the West Yorkshire Violence Reduction Unit's Advisory Group.
Laura is currently leading two studies. The first explores the benefits and hazards of mandating domestic violence perpetrators to a period of compulsory sobriety, while the second is an N8 PRP funded project dedicated to understanding and preventing County Lines ‘cuckooing' victimisation.
Laura is the ESRC Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre's Early Career Researcher (ECR) Champion. In fulfilling this role, she will ensure that ECRs aligned to the Centre are fully supported and have access to dedicated mentoring and training to enable them to become future research leaders. As a Co-Investigator for the Centre, Laura is also undertaking research as part of the County lines policing and vulnerability project.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board
- Principal Investigator
- New York State Psychiatric Institute
- Research Scientist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute
Leah G. Pope is a Research Scientist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute and an Assistant Professor of Behavioral Medicine in the Division of Behavioral Health Services and Policy Research at the Columbia University Department of Psychiatry.
Leah trained as an anthropologist and mental health services researcher. She has extensive experience conducting mixed methods research in the fields of public mental health and criminal justice.
Leah's research has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Science Foundation, and private foundations including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the van Ameringen Foundation, the Wenner Gren Foundation and the Sozosei Foundation.
Leah is currently the principal investigator on an implementation study of the 988 crisis line in New York State and a co-investigator on several additional studies, including an upcoming randomized controlled trial of Crisis Intervention Team training for police officers in the United States.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board
- Senior Research Scientist
Lesley Park, PhD, MPH is a Senior Research Scientist (Epidemiology & Population Health) at the Stanford University School of Medicine. She is the Executive Director of the Veterans Aging Cohort Study (VACS) consortium, an international collaboration of methodologists, clinicians, and trainees who utilize the rich and valuable data from the United States Veterans Health Administration to do impactful research. VACS has been at the forefront of research to understand aging with HIV to improve patient care, particularly with respect to alcohol and other substance use, physiologic frailty, and polypharmacy.
Previously, Dr Park was one of the leaders of the Stanford Center for Population Health Sciences (PHS). PHS aims to improve the health of populations by bringing together diverse disciplines and data to understand and address social, environmental, behavioral, and biological factors. She oversaw all of the educational and training initiatives at PHS, was one of the founding directors of the PHS Data Center and PHS Postdoctoral Fellowship program, and helped facilitate Stanford's international collaboration with the Born in Bradford research programme.
Dr Park is one of the co-founding directors of the Stanford Advancing Health Equity and Diversity (AHEaD) summer research program for college students from underrepresented and historically excluded groups in the health sciences.
Job Titles:
- Co - Investigator, Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre / Police Foundation
- Is Director of the Police Foundation
Dr Rick Muir is Director of the Police Foundation, the UK's independent policing think tank. He has been a public policy researcher for most of his career. Before joining the Police Foundation he worked on public service reform, including on policing and criminal justice policy, at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR). Prior to that he did his DPhil in Latin American politics at the University of Oxford. He is currently a Visiting Professor at Northumbria University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA). He was previously a local councillor in both Oxford and Hackney.
Rick will be supporting the Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre with its policy work, offering advice on how to best engage with senior policing and political stakeholders to maximise the impact of the Centre's work. In addition to being a Co-Investigator Rick is a member of the Centre's National Engagement Group.
Job Titles:
- Senior Lecturer
- Co - Investigator, Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre / University of Manchester
Dr Rose Broad is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester.
She has conducted research on modern slavery and human trafficking, in collaboration with criminal justice agencies and non-government organisations, for over ten years. Rose has numerous publications in the area of human trafficking and modern slavery, including a book focused on the first empirical study of modern slavery offenders, ‘Demystifying Modern Slavery'. Rose is on the Advisory Board of the Modern Slavery Policy Evidence Centre and a previous Fellow of the Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology.
Rose is currently co-lead on the modern slavery strand of the ESRC Policing Futures & Vulnerabilities Centre with Professor David Gadd. This work focuses on the trajectories of modern slavery related cases through the criminal justice system. Successful convictions for modern slavery offences are very low and within this context, this project aims to identify what kinds of intelligence lead to different types of outcomes, what reasons there are for the high rates of attrition, what could be done at earlier stages to prevent modern slavery and how these factors impact the policing of modern slavery.
Rose is also a member of the Centre Ethical Oversight Panel.
Öznur joined the Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre with an interdisciplinary background with a Master's degree in Political Science and an undergraduate degree in International Relations, both earned at the Middle East Technical University (Turkey).
Öznur completed her PhD in 2018 in Sociology at Lancaster University (UK) in which she specialized in how claims over ‘good' citizenship are mobilised and compete at the city scale.
Elizabeth Johnston is responsible for the strategy and development of the European Forum for Urban Security, in liaison with the Executive Committee, as well as overall management. She has also been Executive Director of the French Forum for Urban Security since February 2016. In addition, she is a member of the Advisory Board of the Global Parliament of Mayors and an official associate of the University of Liège (Belgium).
Prior to this, and after beginning her career at a French local authority, Elizabeth Johnston served as Programme Director at the French-American Foundation, and as Violence Prevention Expert at the World Bank in Washington. She holds degrees in Law from Assas University (France), in Political Science from Yale University (United States) and in Public Policy from Marne-La-Vallée University (France).
Job Titles:
- Professor at the University of Buenos Aires
Emilio Ayos is Professor at the University of Buenos Aires and Researcher of the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) at the Gino Germani Research Institute (IIGG), Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Buenos Aires.
Emilio obtained a BA in Sociology, Master's in Social Policies, and Doctorate of Social Sciences from the University of Buenos Aires. He is Director of the Comparative Research Program at IIGG.
Emilio has specialised in the relationship between the fields of crime control and social policy, as well as the ways in which the issue of security is constructed in public debate. He is author of the book ‘Crime and poverty: spaces of intersection between the criminal policy and the social policy in the first decade of the new century'. The book was published as a prize for obtaining the Mention of Honor in the fourteenth Contest of Monographs of Criminal Sciences carried out by the Brazilian Institute of Criminal Sciences. He has published many scientific papers in his field of expertise.
Georgia Priestley joins the Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre having been awarded an ESRC-funded White Rose Doctoral Training Partnership 1+3 Associated Studentship at the University of Leeds.
Georgia graduated with BSc (Hons) in Economics and Politics from Queen Mary, University of London, where she specialised in social economics. After working in the financial sector, as a securities analyst, she worked within the social sector. Most recently, Georgia worked as an interviewer for policy evaluation for the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC), where she interviewed participants suffering from multiple disadvantages, including domestic abuse, homelessness, substance misuse, and mental health issues. While working within social research, Georgia was obtaining a PGDip in Social and Public Policy, from the University of Leeds. During her PGDip she focused on vulnerable groups and welfare policy.
Georgia's research interests include mental health, vulnerable groups, law and policy, safeguarding, and welfare.
Situated in the School of Healthcare at the University of Leeds, Georgia's PhD thesis is titled ‘Examining the use of restrictive practice by the police in response to mental health crises'. This will explore the use of restrictive practices (such as physical and mechanical restraints, e.g. grip handcuffs, tasers and tear gas) as a police response to managing someone who is exhibiting behaviours that could lead to harm to themselves and/or others.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board
- Professor
Job Titles:
- Co - Investigator
- Professor and Chair of the Department of Criminal Justice
Jennifer Wood is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Criminal Justice at Temple University in Philadelphia, USA.
Jennifer's research focuses on the many intersections between policing and public health, including changes in how officers intervene with people experiencing health vulnerabilities such as mental illness. She is the North American Editor for ‘Policing and Society: An International Journal of Research and Policy'.
As a Co-Investigator of the Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre, Jennifer is working within the research strand on mental health. She is assisting with the design and implementation of a scoping review of innovations in front-line police response as well as an observational study of everyday police work in responding to calls for service involving mental health concerns. She also works with the larger team of investigators to advance the Centre's comparative research agenda on policing and vulnerabilities.
Job Titles:
- Is Director of the Monash Gender
Kate Fitz-Gibbon is Director of the Monash Gender and Family Violence Prevention Centre and a Professor of Social Sciences in the Faculty of Arts, Monash University (Victoria, Australia). She also holds affiliated research appointments with the School of Law and Social Justice at University of Liverpool (Honorary Research Fellow, 2016-2020) and the Research Center on Violence at West Virginia University (2019).
Kate's qualifications include a PhD in Criminology (2012), Masters of Human Rights Law (2019), Graduate Certificate of Higher Education (2013) and she is a Graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. Kate conducts research in the area of domestic and family violence, femicide, responses to all forms of violence against women, and the impacts of law reform in Australia and internationally. This research is undertaken with a key focus on issues relating to gender, constructions of responsibility and justice. The findings of Kate's research have been published in books, academic journals, funded reports and presented at national and international criminology conferences.
Kate has advised on homicide law reform, family violence and youth justice reviews in several Australian and international jurisdictions. Her research has been cited by the High Court of Australia. In 2016, Kate was appointed as a member of the Victorian Government's Expert Advisory Committee on Perpetrator Interventions and in 2018 was appointed to the Respect Victoria inaugural Board of Directors. In 2021, she was appointed Chair of Respect Victoria by the Victorian Government. She is the former Chair of the Barwon Centre against Sexual Assault and in 2015 she was awarded a Churchill Fellowship to examine innovative legal responses to intimate femicide.
In her role as a Co-Investigator for the Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre, she is co-lead of the domestic abuse and policing stream. This work will examine the challenges posed for policing policies and practices. Kate is also a member of the Centre's International Advisory Board.
Professor Kiran Trehan is an internationally recognised scholar in knowledge exchange, engagement and impact. Her research specialises in how diversity and inequality is experienced by minority groups. She has longstanding research experience of the key issues affecting minorities in business and communities and has led an extensive number of ESRC and AHRC funded research activities which are distinguished by user engagement, innovation, and community orientation.
Professor Trehan's work has helped cast new light on academic debate. Her research findings have been influential in shaping national and European policy including the OECD, as well regional communities. She has studied and led engagement and impact projects across a range of contexts and disciplines to illuminate what works and why. Her work on how engagement and knowledge transfer has been leveraged to generate deep and sustainable change through the research developed evidenced based tools to ensure research impact changes the way we generate and share knowledge that facilitates purposeful and beneficial change. Through robust, evidence-led research, her work has developed new approaches to the use of research in supporting and delivering policy and practitioner engagement, learning and impact.
As a Co-Investigator for the ESRC Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre, Professor Trehan chairs the Centre's National Engagement Group (NEG). The purpose of the NEG is to support national policy engagement, provide advice on policy, practice and research developments and opportunities, and ensure effective connections between the Centre and relevant national stakeholders and user groups.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Criminology at Edinburgh Napier University
Liz Aston is a Professor of Criminology at Edinburgh Napier University and has been the Director of the Scottish Institute for Policing Research (SIPR) since 2018. Her expertise centres on local policing and her current research focuses on technology in policing, and the intersect between policing and drugs.
In 2021 Liz was awarded an ESRC Open Call Grant as Principal Investigator for the INTERACT project. In addition she is a Co-Investigator on the EPSRC-funded 3PO project and on the Scottish Drug Checking project.
Liz has a strong record of collaborative research on policing both in Scotland and in Europe and is experienced in knowledge exchange and building research-practitioner relationships. In 2020 she was appointed by the Cabinet Secretary for Justice to establish and Chair an Independent Advisory Group on Emerging Technologies in Policing.
Liz is the co-editor of Palgrave's Critical Policing Studies Series and sits on a number of governance and advisory boards, including for the Scottish Violence Reduction Unit and Police Scotland's Drug Strategy Board and their Naloxone Delivery Steering Group. Prior to her SIPR role, she was Head of Social Sciences at Edinburgh Napier University.
Professor Liz Hughes is a mental health nurse by background and worked clinically in acute inpatient mental health settings, and drug and alcohol treatment services.
Prior to her current role as Professor of Nursing in the School of Health and Social Care, Edinburgh Napier University, Liz was Professor of Mental Health at the University of Leeds and retains a Visiting Chair position.
Liz's methodological expertise lies in trials of complex interventions as well as mixed methods realist evaluation. Her current research interests focus on the intersection of sex, sexuality and sexual violence and severe mental health problems (including trauma) as well as co-occurring substance use conditions.
In her work with the ESRC Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre, Liz is a co-lead on the mental health theme, and will undertake research related to how police respond to people with mental health issues who they encounter in every day policing. In addition she will provide mentorship to early career researchers and supervise one of the Centre-funded PhDs.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board
- Employee of the Municipality of Lisbon
Maria has been an employee of the Municipality of Lisbon since 1981, mainly linked to the areas of culture and social rights. She coordinated technical and research teams concerned with, for example, public space, Portuguese tiles and Portuguese sidewalk. She has a scholarship from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the Science and Technology Foundation and has participated in several European projects.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board
- Trainer
- Head of Division of Prevention, Security and International Relations
Mónica is a sociologist with a Master's in sociology and planning, in which she researched policing practices and citizenship at local levels. She has been developing her work in the area of police-citizens cooperation, namely on the implementation of bottom-up collective approaches for crime-prevention and delivery of community policing projects.
Mónica has a professional background in international cooperation (Portuguese National Commission for UNESCO) and on Prevention, namely prevention of youth risk behaviours and drug use prevention (Dependencies Prevention Division, Lisbon Municipality). Since 2008 she has worked in the Lisbon Municipal Police. Her main responsibilities cover police-community relationships and multi-agency cooperation, with a focus on crime prevention, police-community safety partnerships and community capacity building on security and safety issues.
Over her career, Mónica has participated in several international cooperation projects on urban security, namely in the areas of Criminal Prevention and Urban Planning (COST ACTION TU1203-Crime Prevention through Urban Design and Planning), intercultural mediation approaches to urban security (project TIME - Train Intercultural Mediators for a Multicultural Europe - Erasmus +), and on community policing (project SWaPOL - Social Work and Policing, Erasmus+; project CCI-Cutting Crime Impact, Horizon 2020; project on technical-police cooperation for community policing training of the Municipal Guard of Praia City in Cape Verd, UCCLA and Camões Institute; and project IMPPULSE - Improving Police-Population understanding for local security, Erasmus +). She has also been working in the methodological transferability of the community policing model developed in Lisbon, both in national and international contexts, namely in cooperation with the Council of Europe. She is currently working on the project IcARUS:"Innovative Approaches to Urban Security" (Horizon 2020).
Mónica is a trainer on the community policing model, targeting both police officers and civil society, as well as on intercultural approaches to urban safety. She is the author and co-author of several publications on Community Policing.
Job Titles:
- Communications and Engagement Officer
Job Titles:
- Co - Investigator
- Professor of Criminology at Durham University
Nicole Westmarland is Professor of Criminology at Durham University where she is also the Director of the Durham Centre for Research into Violence and Abuse (CRiVA). She has conducted many research and consultancy projects in the field of domestic and sexual violence.
Her books include ‘Violence against Women' (Routledge, 2015), ‘Researching Gender, Violence and Abuse: Theory, Methods, Action' (with Hannah Bows, Routledge, 2018). Her most recent book is ‘Men's Activism to End Violence against Women' (with various co-authors, Policy Press, 2021) and is free to download as an e-book.
In recent years a number of her publications have been around domestic violence perpetrator interventions, and in 2019 she was awarded the COMPASS award in the US for her domestic abuse perpetrator work. The award panel noted the work "has significantly guided and expanded efforts to protect survivors through advancing and evaluating accountable perpetrator intervention research and programming".
As a Co-Investigator of the Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre, Nicole will contribute to the ongoing direction of the Centre and co-lead the research on domestic abuse and vulnerabilities. This will look at how ‘vulnerabilities' are understood and applied to victim-survivors of domestic abuse but also people who use violence and abuse against their partners and/or ex-partners. The work will draw upon the ongoing advances in police responses to domestic abuse in Victoria, Australia and Manchester, England.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Criminology and Sociology at the University of Liverpool
Ross Coomber is Professor of Criminology and Sociology at the University of Liverpool and has more than 30 years' research experience in the drug and alcohol field. He has written extensively and broadly in this area - particularly on the machinations of illicit drug markets nationally and internationally and across different cultural and environmental spaces. His research is strongly interdisciplinary and boasts ongoing collaborations with forensic scientists, medics, researchers and public health practitioners as well as people working in disciplines across the humanities and social sciences.
Ross has been working on aspects of vulnerability and how it intersects with drug markets for many years. He will contribute to the Centre's work to develop an appropriate, nuanced, conceptual understanding of vulnerability that contributes to the policing of vulnerability in policy and practice. Ross will also contribute strongly to Early Career Researcher mentoring and development.
Ross is the primary project lead on the County lines policing and vulnerability project. In the project, the team will initially conduct a survey with all UK police forces to explore existing policing structures and approaches to the policing of vulnerable people caught up in County Lines drug supply. It will also look at the challenges involved in policing vulnerability locally and nationally as well as where promising practice enables policing to respond in more effective and appropriate ways. Following the survey, the team will focus on three to four specially identified force areas. In this work they will interview key people (such as vulnerable county lines involved victims; local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) involved in providing support; those involved with multi-agency responses to vulnerable persons as well as the police) to provide in-depth understanding about promising interventions being employed locally.
Job Titles:
- Co - Investigator
- Professor
Stephen Holland is a Professor in the Departments of Philosophy and Health Sciences, University of York.