A successful Pint of Science event recently took place in Lincoln City! The events were hugely popular and all tickets were sold!
One of the speakers was FCRG member Dr Georgina Gous who contributed to the ‘Crime Night’ on 24th May, 2023. Georgina’s talk was entitled “I make my own decisions! When jury biases become a problem“.
Georgina discussed the types of biases that can impact our ability to make fair and impartial decisions in court (for defendants, victims and witnesses), and the new techniques that courts are using to overcome these biases.
FCRG lead – Dr Ross Bartels – has published in a new, two-study paper entitled “Public Stigmatizing Reactions Toward Nonoffending Pedophilic Individuals Seeking to Relieve Sexual Arousal” in the Journal of Sex Research. The first study showed that the use of the nonsexual pictures and sex dolls to relive sexual arousal led to more stigmatising responses in the public than did the use of the testosterone-lowering medication. The results of Study 2 indicated that stigmatization was driven by disapproving the use of child stimuli rather than the relief of sexual arousal in general.
At the end of April 2023, FCRG deputy, Dr Lauren Smith, presented at the ‘ECR Addictions’ conference held at Kings College London. Lauren’s paper was entitled ‘Gambling in an English prison: A Whole Prison Response‘.
Lauren also attended the House of Lords following an invite by Lord Goldsmith, KC. This was for the launch of the final report by the Commission for Crime and Gambling Related Harms to which Lauren contributed evidence. The full report can be accessed here.
Dr Tochukwu Onwuegbusi and Prof Todd Hogue, along with other Lincoln and ex-Lincoln colleagues, were listed among the authors and organisations that contributed to published review (April 2023) on ‘High Stakes: Gambling Reform for the Digital Age by the Department for Culture, Media & Sport.’ This is a Government White Paper and is set to change regulation.
FCRG deputy – Dr Lauren Smith – along with Karen Harrison and Chloe Wilson (from School of Law) have been awarded £4253.59 from the University’s Pump Priming Scheme for their project Protecting EDI in His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service.
FCRG deputy – Dr Lauren Smith – chaired a panel at The British Academy Early Career Researcher ‘Working with Industry’ event held at UoL. The panel was titled Working with Public Sector Organisations and Niko Kargas was on the panel, alongside colleagues from Law, Health and Social Care, and Social and Political Sciences.
FCRG deputy, Dr Lauren Smith, delivered a webinar on Gambling and Crime: Implications for Probation Practice to probation staff across Wales. Lauren was invited to deliver the webinar following a recent publication: Smith, L. (2022). The role of probation in supporting people who have experienced gambling and crime-related harms. Probation Quarterly, 26, 60-65. https://doi.org/10.54006/QPRS9599.
Ross has had a new paper published (with colleagues from other institutions) entitled “Exploring the stigmatisation of offending and non-offending paedophiles: A terror management approach” in the Journal of Criminal Psychology.
The study examined whether the stigma towards paedophilic individuals is related to negative associations regarding severe mental illness and extreme violence, and used a Terror Management Theory (TMT) approach to provide insights into why paedophilia is so highly stigmatised. The results showed that judgements were harsher in the offending conditions than the non-offending conditions, and also indicated that the stigmatisation of paedophilic individuals may be mediated by terror management processes.
The British Board of Film Classification has published their work on non-photographic images of child sexual abuse, which includes a commissioned report by FCRG member Dr Hannah Merdian and the onlinePROTECT team.
The work has been endorsed by the Internet Watch Foundation, Barnardo’s, Childnet, and NSPCC.
FCRG member, Dr Tochukwu Onwuegbusi, presented at the Science and Psychology Conference 2022 in London (29th Nov) and Bristol (30th Nov). His talk was titled: “Crime – How do we solveit?” where he described the application of a novel eye-tracking method that can be used to aid police crime investigation, particularly in suspect identification. Tochs presented data suggesting that fixation patterns may be repeated during the recognition of familiar scenes. Thus, tracking eye fixations could give insight as to whether the suspect under police interrogation is lying about having memory of the crime scene.
