Back in November, I had the opportunity to fly to Melbourne (it didn’t feel like that much of an opportunity when I was clutching coffee at 5am in the airport) to attend the Australasian Jury Research and Practices Conference held at the beautiful Monash University. Attending with me were two […]
justice
7 posts
With high numbers of Australians experiencing domestic abuse, some may wonder how a person can fall in love and stay with their abuser. This may in part be motivated by self-protective desire to believe “that wouldn’t happen to me, I wouldn’t let it” and a desire to believe that the […]
Domestic and family violence is a pervasive social problem that can have significant, long-term effects for a survivor’s physical and mental health (Queensland Government, 2015). In Australia in 2012, it was estimated that 17.0% of all women and 5.3% of all men had experienced an incident of domestic violence at […]
Whenever someone I don’t know too well, a distant friend, someone at the gym, or even the lady at the convenience store, asks me “so what is your PhD on?”, I try (as my supervisors suggested), to sum up the next four years of intense research into just one statement. […]
I was fifteen when I first encountered something struck me as making absolutely no sense. In a sentencing hearing Old Bailey Judge Sir John Leonard declared of a rape victim that “the trauma suffered by the victim was not so great”. He promptly handed out a longer sentence to one […]
Legal decision-making in relation to sexual assault is often influenced by shared social beliefs (schemas). In investigating these beliefs, prior research has confounded different schemas – offence prototypes, sexual script schemas, and victim and perpetrator stereotypes. At this stage, it is unclear which schemas are influential and when, making it difficult […]
I first joined the Applied Social Psychology Lab as part of the Summer Research program at the end of 2012. Having worked for a number of community projects as a support worker and volunteer over the years, I became acutely aware of the need for, and importance of, evidence based […]