PhD student presents research globally with DTC grant

About the project

PhD student, Lily Graham, presented her work on adult family violence at two major criminology conferences in Brisbane, supported by the Doctoral Training Centre’s international engagement funding.

Our Doctoral Training Centre for Industry Collaboration (DTC) offers postgraduate research opportunities across a broad range of subjects and schools within the University. Supported by a wide programme of skills training and professional development activities, as well as a fully funded studentship, PhD students get extra funding to support their research. For Lily Graham, this meant a grant to take advantage of research, knowledge exchange and public engagement opportunities abroad in 2025.

Lily, a PhD research student within the School of Law and Policing and our Connect Centre for International Research on Interpersonal Violence and Harm (INTERRELATE) , attended two criminology conferences in Brisbane, Australia - the Asian Criminological Society (ACS) and the Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology (ANZSOC). As well as attending, Lily was delighted to be accepted as a speaker at both conferences.

After 24 hours of travelling and a time jump of ten hours, Lily landed in Brisbane. The first conference was ANZSOC with three days of presentations. Lily attended multiple panels on gender-based violence. Her paper, ‘The perils, the positives and the possibilities: using police data to research adult family violence’ was part of the ‘Social and Legal Responses to Domestic Violence’ panel. Although her presentation was the last of the day, Lily was both nervous and excited to see the room was almost full.

Lily’s presentation focused on her experiences of analysing case files from two northern England police forces in her PhD research. She showed how this data allowed her to establish what familial domestic abuse may look like, who may be involved and how professionals responded to these relationships. Lily also discussed some of the limitations of this data and explored how colleagues in the field can collaborate to improve data capture. Despite her initial nerves, she found the Q&A a great opportunity to network and explore the views of her peers.

Later in the week, it was the turn of ACS. The conference started with a traditional ‘welcome to the country’ as well as tours of Brisbane’s criminal courts and more. This time Lily’s panel, titled ‘Gendered Violence’, was the first of the day. Her paper, ‘“The too hard to deal with... pile”: The complex contradictions in understanding and responding to adult family violence as a form of domestic abuse’, focused on some of the preliminary findings generated from her PhD research.

She discussed how current support systems often do not meet the needs of victim-survivors of familial domestic abuse. For Lily, ACS was a great opportunity to present with researchers working in Australia, the Solomon Islands, and Fiji, sharing the similarities and differences in domestic abuse response from each of their geographic contexts.

" As a final year PhD student, these opportunities to disseminate my findings and practice my public speaking (especially with a VIVA around the corner!) were invaluable. "

Lily continued: "This experience also allowed me to connect with academics from across the globe and gain further knowledge about international domestic abuse research, policies and practices."

Lily’s research focusses on improving knowledge of adult family violence, particularly how risk assessment practices impact, from the viewpoints of victims, police, and practitioners. While it was a whirlwind visit, covering two conferences in just a few days, Lily gained invaluable experience, insight, knowledge and connections to support and develop her focus further.

Research areas