Molly has been working as a Research Assistant for the Contextual Safeguarding team since July 2020. She has worked on a variety of projects, including Contextual Safeguarding and Youth Justice, Contextual Safeguarding: The Next Chapter, and The Contextual Safeguarding Academics Network. Her focus within the team currently is on the Risk Outside The Home (ROTH) pathway project.
Before joining the team, Molly worked for The Children’s Society. Prior to this, she was completed 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 systemic and structural harm, and the ethics of intervening into young people’s lives.
Since October 2022 she has been doing 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. Her PhD research is system-harm focussed, exploring how the ethics and moral underpinnings of social work – including human rights and social justice - are navigated obligations to enact controversial policies in radicalisation risk work. She continues working in the Contextual Safeguarding team alongside this.