Programme Director of the Research Programme on Violence

• Start date: 01 October 1999
• End date: 31 August 2002

The overall aim of the Violence Programme is to expand and enhance understanding of the various forms of violence to the person in order to increase our knowledge about their causes and how they might be prevented, reduced or eliminated. The Programme is central to the Councils theme of Social Integration and Exclusion. Four research areas were identified in the programme remit: the nature and explanations of various forms of violence; organisational, institutional and community responses to violence; and media and the representation of violence. The Commissioning Panel selected twenty projects. Together, the selected projects allow a creative engagement with three research areas above, and will produce a knowledge base about violence against the person which varies in discipline, in methodological approach, in its engagment with users of the research, and which lends itself to innovative dissemination strategies. Methodologically, the projects include diverse ways of exploring the meaning of violence, from the ethnographic studies, depth interviews with convicted offenders, a large scale survey, the use of experiments examining by-stander intervention into violent situations. Violence against the person will be interrogated from a variety of perspectives: recipients of violence (children and adults), perpetrators of violence, policy makers, front line professionals delivering community services, and general members of the public. Projects will place social division at the heart of research: gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, conflict in Northern Ireland, to name but a few. Added value to the selected projects will come from the synergy of the overlapping interests. Within the programme, we will explore the impact of conducting sensitive, and potentially dangerous research on the researchers themselves. We will ask: how is the process of social research affected by danger of the field? How do researchers manage danger and violence, and how is this management similar or different to those that they study