Rachel Armitage

I am an applied researcher, and whilst I have held many leadership roles as Professor (since 2014), my fundamental passion is to ensure that my research leads to real world impacts at policy and practice level. My research on designing out crime spans three decades and has influenced local, national and international planning policy - designing spaces and places to reduce burglary (within residential settings), shoplifting (within retail settings), terrorist threats (at sites of critical infrastructure and multi-modal passenger terminals), and domestic abuse (through the Sanctuary scheme). My publications in this subject area include three books – Crime Prevention through Housing Design (2013); Re-building Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (2019) and Retail Crime (2018), as well as many peer-reviewed papers, special edition journals and practice-based briefing papers/articles such as Conversation.

More recently, my research has focused upon the harms associated with technology-assisted child sexual abuse (TACSA). I have worked closely with key agencies to establish the Indirect Victims of Indecent Images of Children Strategic Group. I have worked alongside colleagues to influence changes in policy and practice, including the Centre for Expertise in Child Sexual Abuse guidance for social workers, the Lucy Faithful Foundation’s Faithful Paper and lobbying to change police policy at the warrant. I have contributed to articles in the Guardian (paper and podcast), Sky News, BBC Women’s Hour BBC 5Live. Influenced by the findings of my research, in 2022, I founded the charity Talking Forward - supporting families affected by online CSA. I am also publishing on this subject area, with recent peer reviewed papers in Victims and Offenders, Journal of Sexual Aggression (winner of most downloaded paper 2022) and papers on the digital identification of indecent images of CSA – our paper at the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling, Prague (2023) winning the Innovative Paper Award.

I am the founder (as well as volunteer and Trustee) for the Leeds based charity Talking Forward, supporting families affected by TACSA. I am the Deputy Chair of Trutees for the Marie Collins Foundation, supporting the victims (and their families) of TACSA.