Molly has been working as a Research Assistant for the Contextual Safeguarding team since July 2020. She works on a variety of projects, including Contextual Safeguarding and Youth Justice, Contextual Safeguarding: The Next Chapter, and The Contextual Safeguarding Academics Network. From October 2022 she will be undertaking an ESRC funded PhD in Sociology and Social Policy, exploring whether the values of the Social Work profession align with the values underpinning current policies around preventing the radicalisation of young people. She will continue working in the Contextual Safeguarding team alongside this.
Before joining the team, Molly worked for The Children’s Society. Prior to this, she was completing her MA in Human Rights at University College London. Here, her research focused on the sexual exploitation and abuse of women and children in post-conflict zones perpetrated by UN peacekeepers. Her wider research interests include understanding and responding to child exploitation (including sexual, criminal, and radicalisation), intersectional feminist theory, social policy analysis, and human rights in practice. She is particularly interested in how safeguarding policy and practice operates in perpetrating structural harm and the ethics of intervening into young people’s lives, including how policy and practice aimed at addressing exploitation and abuse can be gendered, racialised, and classist