CARA Conference

Chris joined the Hampton Trust team in 2023. In his role he oversees the operational delivery of CARA across a number of police forces in the UK. As a former Senior Probation Officer, Chris brings with him extensive experience in working with a diverse range of individuals within the criminal justice system and a profound understanding of the complexities surrounding offender management and rehabilitation. His specialisations include working with domestic abuse perpetrators and individuals deemed high-risk offenders both in the community and within secure settings.

Chris trained at DAIP in Duluth, Minnesota, and is further accredited by the Minnesota Board of Social Work. On return to the UK, Chris wrote and delivered a non-mandatory perpetrator programme for an organisation in Wales; and prior to joining Hampton Trust, delivered a unique LLIF (Local Leadership Integration Fund) prison-leavers project combining supported accommodation and family mediation services for 18-25 year old males, aiding family reintegration and resettlement into their communities.

Alexandria is a trauma specialist who has extensive experience working, researching and teaching in prisons. Alexandria has led evaluations of trauma-responsive programmes and works on collaborative research projects. Alexandria is currently involved in co-lead research projects. The first alongside Dr Sarah Waite, involves an evaluation of Greater Manchester’s Problem Solving Court for Women. The second project is a long-term partnership with Sofia Buncy, DL, MBE and Dr Sarah Goodwin, to explore culturally informed support provision for Muslim women who are involved in the justice system. Alexandria has also translated her research into a successful working with Trauma Quality Mark, which is offered by One Small Thing nationally to services who are working relationally with people who have experienced trauma.

Alison joined Hampshire Constabulary in 2000, as a Home Office Accelerated Promotion Graduate entry, undertaking high profile roles enhanced by secondments to HMICFRS and teaching at John Jay Exchange College of Criminal Justice, New York. Also working in San Paulo, Brazil supporting victims of people trafficking. Her passions centre on utilising the tenets of procedural justice to build legitimacy in policing. Alison joined the MPS in 2020 as a Frontline Policing Commander, also responsible for Neighbourhood Policing. She was appointed NPCC Chief Officer lead for Out of Court Resolutions in 2021 and Director for the Police Race Action Plan in 2023.

Hayley Alderson is an NIHR Advanced Fellow and Senior Research Fellow based within the Population Health Sciences Institute. 

Prior to working in academia she was a drug and alcohol practitioner and she has worked within a variety of substance misuse settings (criminal justice, residential and in the community) between 2004- 2016. She also have experience of working alongside a team of Social Workers within the Emergency Duty Team addressing Health and Social Care problems across North Yorkshire and York.

She is a practitioner-researcher working at the interface of Social Care and Public Health. Her research focuses on individuals with multiple disadvantage and complex needs particularly in the arena of domestic violence and abuse (DVA), mental health, substance use and safeguarding. Prior to commencing a career in research, she had 12 years’ practitioner experience working in voluntary, community or social enterprise organisations, local authorities and the HMP Prison service.

Her practitioner experience has equipped her with skills and knowledge to engage with community groups often excluded from academic research. Her combined practitioner background and researcher experience supports me to undertake pragmatic research that can have real world impact.

John is an Assistant Professor, social work educator and researcher at Northumbria University and a recognised Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.  John is Head of Subject for Social Work and academic lead across a range of under-graduate and post-graduate social work programmes teaching on knowledge for safeguarding practice, safeguarding children and young people in practice, child sexual exploitation (CSE) and missing children and trauma-informed practice. Prior to joining Northumbria University in 2015, John was a senior social work practitioner with Barnardos and seconded lead professional for CSE and missing children with Northumberland Children’s Services. In this role John was responsible at strategic level for assisting Northumberland Safeguarding Children Board (NSCB) in developing multi-agency policy, practice and action planning for safeguarding missing children and children at risk of CSE. As a member of NSCBs Vulnerable Adolescent Sub-Committee and Northumberland’s Risk Management Group (RMG), John has assisted social work practitioners in undertaking statutory risk and needs assessment and formulating plans to manage the complex behaviours presented by vulnerable adolescents.  

Dr Rasiah Thayakaran, PhD is currently a Statistician at the University of Birmingham. He has over 20 years of academic experience with a deep knowledge of the R programming language with expertise spanning across data science in health, environmental science, statistics, mathematics, crime, and social media.

He has been co-investigator in several high-profile crime, health and environmental research projects and has published extensively in respected journals, contributing to a wide range of subjects from health informatics to environmental impacts.

Dr Sara Morgan is an Associate Professor in public health at the University of Southampton and the Chief Investigator on the CARA national evaluation.

She leads the public health advisors for the National Public Health Research Centre and is the prevention theme lead for the NIHR ARC Wessex. She is passionate about reducing health inequalities, and understanding how to break the transgenerational cycle of violence in homes and communities. She’s happiest when she’s on a surfboard and is currently learning to wing foil. 

Sara (Afshar) Morgan | LinkedIn

Sarah is a criminologist with expertise in penology and criminal justice responses to women. Her research spans staff-prisoner relationships, prison officer development, and women's justice innovations, including current work on Women’s Problem-Solving Courts. Sarah has worked with HMPPS, Unlocked Graduates, and the Howard League for Penal Reform on research, teaching and knowledge exchange. A Senior Fellow of the HEA and recipient of the British Society of Criminology’s National Award for Excellence in Teaching, she is passionate about creative, participatory, and person-centred research and education. Sarah is a trustee of Transform Justice and committed to bridging research, practice, and lived experience in criminal justice reform.

Dr Shona Minson is a member of the Women's Justice Board, a Research Associate at the Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford and a BBC New Generation Thinker.  Her research on the sentencing of mothers focuses on the rights of children whose parents are involved with the criminal legal system. 

Steph Scott is a Lecturer in Public Health and Qualitative Methods and holds a Trustee role with the charity NE Youth. She is a social scientist with inter-disciplinary expertise across applied public health, sociology and criminology. Steph has secured research income with a total value of over £6.5 million (£2.3 million as PI), including the recent award of a prestigious ESRC New Investigator grant and ESRC large grant. Her research interests include marginalisation, stigma and health inequalities, particularly in relation to justice-involved families, young people, vulnerable populations and those experiencing multiple, complex needs. Methodologically, Steph is a highly experienced qualitative researcher with particular expertise in advanced qualitative skills such as longitudinal methods; co-created and equitable data collection and analysis; and visual or creative methodologies such as diary elicitation and poetry.

Dr Scott is an associate member of Fuse, the Centre for Translational Research in Public Health, involved in several NIHR SPHR research programmes and a named collaborator for the NIHR NENC ARC. Current work focuses on: young people’s experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic; emotional wellbeing, health and health inequalities in children and young people with an incarcerated family member; the impact of stigma on the health of marginalised groups; vaccine inequalities; prison food environments; food insecurity amongst those experiencing severe mental illness; and first-time offenders of domestic violence and abuse. 

Emma has been working in the field of domestic abuse and gender-based violence for more than 10 years. She has a Masters of Social Work (Policy and Intervention) and has worked with victim services in South Korea, New Zealand, Canada, and the UK.

Emma has been working with people using harmful behaviour in their relationships since 2015 as a facilitator and practitioner, delivering behavioural change programmes. She has managed a perpetrator service across Gloucestershire, where she wrote a Healthy Relationships programme that was chosen as an NCLB Awards finalist.

She has been involved in the development and delivery of a wide range of domestic abuse training programmes for professionals. Emma has been delivering CARA since 2016, and since 2021 she is leading the national expansion of CARA, driving its growth and ensuring its effectiveness across the country.

Emma Hazan LinkedIn

Kam Stevens is a filmmaker, prison reform advocate, and program facilitator committed to creating positive change within the criminal justice system. As a Senior Digital Consultant at Grow Transform Belong (GTB), he uses his lived experience to develop impactful digital content that promotes personal growth and rehabilitation and facilitate meaningful training.  Kam is also the Director of The Growth App, a digital platform supporting justice-involved individuals through prevention, rehabilitation, and recovery. Co-created with 150 justice-involved individuals and experts in criminal justice, behavioral science, and social reintegration, The Growth App provides personalized resources, mental health support, and skill-building tools to aid long-term reintegration. Kam’s journey exemplifies resilience and a commitment to systemic reform, inspiring others to create positive change.

Kate O’Brien is Associate Professor in Criminology, Durham University and Co-Director of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Programme. Kate is a prison researcher with expertise in ethnographic, feminist and participatory methods. Current projects focus on mothers’ experiences of parenting from prison; the harms of early days in custody; and supporting women in prison impacted by gender-based violence.

Lydia Lochhead has an extensive professional background and experience of working with people and communities who use drugs in criminal justice and drug treatment settings. She is currently working as a Senior Research Assistant for Northumbria University on projects exploring mental wellbeing, substance use, exploitation, domestic violence, and stigma. 

Having graduated as an engineer in biological sciences, with a Masters in cellular nutrition and a PhD in sociology, I am a lifelong researcher. As a social scientist, I have expertise in marginalisation, welfare and wellbeing. My work focuses on understanding processes of engagement for groups which are often deemed ‘hard to reach’ or in situations of social or health precarity. I have expertise in a number of research methodologies and I am particularly known for my innovative work in realist approaches to research.

I am Director of the Centre for Health and Social Equity; and deputy lead for the theme of Health Inequalities and Marginalised Communities of the NIHR North East North Cumbria Applied Research Collaboration.

Rachel is a Professor of Law and Social Justice and Director of Research for the Law School at Leeds Beckett University. Rachel's research is inter-disciplinary in nature, be that the interface between design and offender decision making; or the multi-agency approaches to reducing the impacts of online child sexual abuse and the devastation this brings to the families of those involved.

Professor Armitage's research on designing out crime spans three decades and has influenced local, national and international planning policy - designing spaces and places to reduce burglary (within residential settings), shoplifting (within retail settings), terrorist threats (at sites of critical infrastructure and multi-modal passenger terminals), and domestic abuse (through the Sanctuary scheme). Her publications in this subject area include books – Crime Prevention through Housing Design (2013); Re-building Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (2019) and Retail Crime (2018), as well as peer-reviewed papers, special edition journals and practice-based briefing papers/articles such as the Conversation. Rachel's research on housing design has also focused upon the role of housing in the prevention of domestic abuse, and the impact of housing on mental and physical health.

More recently, Rachel's research has focused upon the harms associated with online child sexual abuse, focusing on policy and practice improvements to reduce the harms to family members when an arrest is made/investigation is taking place. Rachel is an applied researcher, with an ethos that research must influence change, and to this end she has active charity roles including Deputy Chair of Trustees for the Marie Collins Foundation and founder and Chair of Trustees for the Leeds based charity Talking Forward, that has supported hundreds of families affected by Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) offending in the UK. She is also publishing on this subject area, with recent peer reviewed papers in Victims and Offenders, Journal of Sexual Aggression (winner of most downloaded paper 2022) and papers on digital identification of indecent images – her paper at the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (2023) winning the Innovative Paper Award.

Professor Tracey Young is co-lead for the Health Economics, Evaluation and Equality (HEEE) theme for ARC Yorkshire and Humber and is Professor in Health Economist in the Sheffield Centre of Health and Related Research (SCHARR), School of Medicine and Population Health at the University of Sheffield.

Tracey has over 25 years’ experience in applied health service research and her research interests include the design and analysis of economic evaluations in applied health and social care at national and local levels and the development and application of methods for measuring uncertainty in health services research.

The core theme of Vanessa’s research is exploring ways to embed understandings of domestic abuse and coercive control in the criminal law and criminal justice system. She has worked collaboratively with colleagues in criminal justice, social work, criminology and law in this area for over a decade. She is the author of an extensive list of international journal papers and is presenting alongside her research contributors at this event.

Rachel Wease is a community activist and advocate for women and mothers in the North East of England. Rachel has previously advised on the development of the research design and tools used as part of the CARA project. Rachel has substantial voluntary  experience of supporting mothers and women from positions of vulnerability and marginalisation. She has also published work as a lead author on Teaching Sensitive Subjects and involving people with lived experiences of professional courses.