Dr Ellen Reeves BA, PhD

Personal Statement

Dr Ellen Reeves is a Lecturer within the University of Liverpool Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology. Ellen joined the team in 2023 and had previously been a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Monash Gender and Family Violence Prevention Centre (Monash University, Australia) – where she also completed her PhD in 2021.

Ellen is a criminologist whose work focuses on the unintended consequences of domestic abuse law reform for victim-survivors, and critiques of carceral feminism. Her key areas of focus are: the effectiveness of intervention/protection orders as a response to domestic abuse; the role of police in responding to domestic abuse; the criminalisation of coercive control; the misidentification of women victim-survivors as predominant aggressors; domestic violence disclosure schemes; and LGBTQA+ victim-survivors’ experiences of using the law for domestic abuse. Ellen is also particularly interested in qualitative methodologies and in particular, ethical approaches to researching sensitive issues such as gendered crime.