Professor Pamela Cox

Biography

I teach and research across social history, social policy, socio-legal studies and criminology. I am chair of the Social History Society and also work as a policy consultant. My new co-authored book, Young Criminal Lives: Life Courses and Life Chances from 1850 (written with crime historians Barry Godfrey, Heather Shore and Zoe Alker) investigates the long-term impact of 19th and early 20th century youth justice interventions. We use digital record linkage to establish 'what happened next' to a large cohort of delinquent, difficult and destitute children passing through England's early youth justice systems.  We raise questions about the uses of historical evidence in contemporary evidence-based policy making. Our early findings from this project (summarised here) generated much media coverage. I am also working on another project that focuses on a pressing present-day challenge - that of recurrent care proceedings in the English child protection system. I recently led an interdisciplinary evaluation of two pioneering interventions (Positive Choices and Mpower) working with birth mothers at risk of losing further children to care. I have written about this work in the Journal of Law and Society and the Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law. There's a short video about the project here. I was recently part of a further policy project led by Aisha Gill scoping the needs of victims of honour based abuse, forced marriage and FGM.

Research Interest

modern social and cultural history social policy, social justice and criminal justice gender relations youth justice, child rights, family law