ProfessorSusan Heward-Belle

Professor Heward-Belle's research is concerned with how services, systems and institutions respond to gender-based violence, and how those responses can be made safer and more just for the women, children and survivors at their centre. Her work is distinctive in redirecting scrutiny away from victim-survivors and toward the people who use violence, asking how professionals, organisations and policy frameworks can hold perpetrators accountable rather than, as too often happens, holding mothers responsible for the harm done to them and their children. This concern grew directly out of her doctoral research on the fathering practices of men who perpetrate domestic violence, which exposed how coercive control extends into and exploits women's roles as mothers.

A central strand of her work examines the intersections of domestic and family violence, mental health and substance misuse, the "complex" cases that services frequently struggle to respond to coherently. Through nationally significant projects including PATRICIA (interagency collaboration between child protection and specialist family violence services), STACY (Safe and Together Addressing Complexity) and Invisible Practices (interventions with fathers who use violence), she and her collaborators have developed practice-led knowledge, communities of practice, and practical frameworks and guides now embedded in the child protection and family violence sectors. This body of work reflects her conviction that rigorous research and frontline practice wisdom belong together.

More recently her research has extended to child sexual abuse and exploitation and to survivor-led system reform. Projects such as DICE (Disrupting Child Sexual Exploitation) and Dignity by Design place the expertise of people with lived experience at the heart of redesigning the systems meant to serve them. Across these projects, she works with a wide methodological repertoire, including qualitative and participatory inquiry, co-design, evaluation research, scoping reviews, and analysis of linked administrative data, chosen to fit the question rather than the reverse.

Underpinning all of this is a strong commitment to research translation and impact. Her projects routinely produce not only scholarly publications but practice guides, evaluation reports and collaborative frameworks commissioned by and delivered back to government departments and community organisations. She contributes to public and policy debate through submissions, expert advisory roles and regular media commentary, working to ensure that evidence about violence against women and children shapes the policies and practices that affect their safety.