Lab Overview:
The Forensic Psychology Research Group conducts high quality and impactful psychological research that furthers our understanding of offending behaviour and victimisation, and that contributes to the successful functioning of the legal and criminal justice systems at all levels, with a goal of promoting fair, just, and secure societies.
Research conducted by this group informs theory and contributes directly to research-informed teaching, evidence-based practice, and policy. The group develops and maintains effective knowledge exchange partnerships with charities, law enforcement, legal agencies, and prison and probation services. Collaboration with other Colleges and Faculties across BCU is key.
Members of the forensic psychology research group are committed to ongoing training and development and provide a supportive environment for early career researchers to develop.
The group welcomes requests for both media and professional consultancy work. We are committed to a research-informed and ethical approach to media correspondence which means we will not comment on topics that are beyond the limits of our competence.
Research Areas & Expertise:
- Interpersonal Violence including intimate partner violence; domestic violence and abuse; coercive control; sexual offending; knife crime; abuse of older people; family violence and related dynamics (parental alienation); mass casualty attacks; and gun violence.
- Understanding Offending and Responding to Crime including hate crime; non-violent crime; radicalisation; incels & the manosphere; misogynistic terrorism; personality & crime; youth offending; gang-related offending; interventions for offending; knife crime interventions and evaluations; criminal action patterns and profiling of offending populations (including of risk); the geography of crime and geographical offender profiling; stalking and harassment; workplace offending; and police responses to serious sexual and violent crime.
- Cybercrime & Forensic Cyberpsychology including cyber-deception and theft; false online representations; online romance scams; social networking fraud; online harassment; online/networked misogyny; gender-based online violence; online risks; harm and harassment; inclusive cybersecurity; effectiveness of video links in the courtroom; policing, policies, and procedure surrounding online misogyny.
- Help-Seeking, Access to Justice and Victim Experiences including understanding victimisation; help-seeking and reporting behaviours; victim experiences of the criminal justice system (including barriers to engagement); access to criminal justice; effective responses and support in domestic abuse; bereavement after murder or manslaughter.
- Diversity in the Criminal Justice System including neurodiversity in the justice system; LGBTQ+ community policing; and cultural influences on legal psychological processes.
- Eyewitness Memory & Investigative Interviewing including memory conformity and false memory; eyewitness recall; rapport building; reluctant witnesses; cooperation with police; and cross-cultural investigative interviewing.
- Understanding & Enhancing Policing including police communication; organisational culture in policing; police decision making; novel pedagogies for enhancing police learning; evidence-based policing; and police use of research.
- Attitudes to Policing and Justice including public perceptions of policing; procedural justice and police legitimacy; public perceptions of custodial sentencing rates; jury decision making; and public attitudes to police use of dogs.
- Public Understanding of Crime and Attitudes to Offending Behaviour including fear of crime; public perceptions and understanding of domestic and family violence/abuse; domestic abuse support experience; the characteristics of hate crime; attitudes towards those who offend, violence, and offending; personality & attitudes towards criminal behaviour.
- Research and Methodological Expertise: advanced quantitative and qualitative analysis techniques; ethnographic research; corpus assisted discourse analysis for online data; implicit measures of attitudes; questionnaire and scale development; investigative interviewing methods including those involving confederates; ethical considerations in high-risk and online research; service evaluations and independent reviews; consultancy; advanced literature reviews including scoping reviews, systematic mapping, and systematic reviews; and reproducible and open science practices.
Some current projects include:
- Examining publicly available policies, procedure, or guidance surrounding online misogyny, the manosphere, or incel-related violence, provided by police forces across England and Wales
- Exploring involuntary celibacy and gender-based violence.
- Eyewitness memory: authority and eyewitness memory, beliefs about eyewitness memory, emotional memories across cultures.
- Facilitating access to justice for domestic abuse survivors.
- Guilt attribution in intimate partner violence: the role of gender in police decision making processes.
- Intracultural and cross-cultural investigation of the misinformation effect.
- Language, incels, and policing: a multidisciplinary approach to examining online incel discourse and police perceptions of the incel community.
- Public perceptions of abuse across the lifespan.
- Reasons for reluctance to cooperate among witnesses to crime.
- Sexual victimisation in cases of frotteurism and exhibitionism.
- The effectiveness of self-generated cue mnemonics to facilitate eyewitness recall.
- The use of social influence and rapport to enhance cooperation within the criminal justice system.
- Understanding the factors which predict security acceptance behaviours in organisations and among cyber professionals.
- Background characteristics of workplace mass shooters.
Lab Leads:
Dr Silvia Fraga Dominguez & Dr Rebecca Wheeler-Mundy
Team Members:
The Forensic Psychology group benefits from a dynamic group of academics with a diversity of experience and expertise in various applied psychology areas and with complementary interests.
Dr Nkansah Anakwah, Kyle Bridgman-Lewis, Emily Davies-Smith, Klara Del Moro, Antonieta Fostier, Dr Chris Fullwood, Kai Gaskin, Lauren Gillespie, Professor Laura Hammond, Bryony Hodgetts, Professor Craig Jackson, Gavin May, Sarah McBrearty, Emily Platt, Natasha Pope, Dr Chrisa Pornari, Marcia Shakespeare, Dimitra Tsirogianni, Bobbie Jay White.
Collaborations:
- UK: Arden University, Goldsmiths, University of London, Manchester Metropolitan University, Royal Holloway, University of London, University of Birmingham, the University of Derby, University of Gloucestershire, University of Kent, University of Leicester, University of Nottingham, University of Portsmouth.
- International: John Jay College of Criminal Justice (United States), Karolinska Institute (Sweden), Maastricht University, Vrije University Amsterdam (the Netherlands), University of Ghana, University of Cape Coast (Ghana).
The Group also maintains strong links with many agencies and charities including: Centre for Women’s Justice, Crowdstrike, Hourglass, Women Acting in Today’s Society (WAITS), Support After Murder and Manslaughter (SAMM), West Midlands Police and other UK police forces.
Members have also provided consultancy for the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice, the Victim’s Commissioner, the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners, and the Office of National Statistics.