Use of Techology and Artificial Intelligence in Asylum Decision Making.
(Prof. Amina Memon, Prof. Jill Marshall and Dr Zoe Given-Wilson)

Exploration of the rapidly expanding use of technology and artificial intelligence (AI) in the asylum context.  This project will bring together people with first-hand experience of the asylum process, academics, asylum and tech industry professionals to explore the  implications and ethics of harnessing technology in the complex cross-cultural setting of asylum determinations.

The project will run from January to July 2025.  We will hold a series of focus groups and round table events to identify the potential consequences of introducing such technologies as well as ethical and practical considerations.  This will be disseminated and we will develop guidance for professionals and those seeking asylum.

This is a multi-partner project and is funded by a Social Purpose Grant from Royal Holloway University of London.

 

Understanding Support and Resilience for Police Officers Working Child Exploitation Cases.
(Zeast Kamal, supervised by Dr Lauren Bryan and Prof Amina Memon, Royal Holloway University and Prof. Becky Milne, Unviersity of Southampton)

This study seeks to understand how police officers investigating child exploitation cases manage the emotional demands of their work, focusing on the personal and organisational supports that best help them cope. Research shows that officers in these roles often face “secondary traumatic stress” due to repeated exposure to traumatic material, which can lead to increased stress, burnout, and symptoms akin to PTSD (Hurrell et al., 2018; Cronje et al., 2020). Organisational factors, such as high workloads and limited mental health resources, further exacerbate these challenges (Drew & Williamson, 2024).

Despite these risks, some officers report experiencing “compassion satisfaction”—a sense of fulfilment from helping others—which appears to protect against burnout and promote resilience (Turgoose et al., 2017; Burnett et al., 2020). However, little is known about which specific forms of support—both personal and from the workplace—are most effective in fostering resilience in officers handling child exploitation cases. Through both survey analysis and in-depth interviews, this study will explore these support factors in detail, aiming to identify practical strategies that can enhance well-being and resilience among officers in these demanding roles.

Research Questions and Approach

First, we will analyse responses from an existing survey of 91 UK officers, examining how personal factors like age, experience, and caregiving responsibilities relate to secondary trauma, burnout, and compassion satisfaction. This analysis will address our first research question: How do sociodemographic factors (age, gender, culture, education, caregiving responsibilities, and employment status) relate to officers’ levels of stress, burnout, and compassion satisfaction?

To gain a richer understanding, subject to the approval from the University Ethics C’tee we would like to conduct semi-structured interviews with officers. These conversations will explore how officers manage the unique stressors of their roles, including the specific types of organisational and personal support that help them. By hearing directly from officers, we will address our second research question: What forms of personal and organisational support are perceived as beneficial in managing secondary trauma? This will include examining organisational factors, like workplace policies or mental health resources, and personal factors, such as coping strategies and social support networks.

Expected Outcomes

By exploring both survey data and direct insights from interviews, we aim to identify the types of support and coping strategies that are most valuable to officers in the field. The findings could inform policies and programmes that help reduce burnout, strengthen resilience, and foster a healthier, more supportive work environment. Ultimately, the goal is to support officers’ well-being, ensuring they have the resources needed to manage the unique demands of their roles effectively.

 

 

Psychology Research Evidence (PRE) Project
(Prof. Hilary Evans Cameron and Dr. Jane Herlihy)

Should a refugee status decision-maker expect that a claimant will remember the date of her assault? Should they expect that a claimant facing pressing danger would have fled at the first opportunity? How much consistency should they expect among the claimant’s various accounts of the same event? How much detail should they expect the claimant to remember?

Such judgments should be informed by psychology research evidence – the body of findings that the scientific community considers to be the best available information about how people generally think and act (e.g. Herlihy & Turner 2010; Evans Cameron 2010; Herlihy, Evans Cameron & Stuart 2023). Yet studies suggest that, in assessing a claimant’s truthfulness, refugee status decision-makers rarely engage with psychology research evidence and instead rely exclusively on their own common sense – which is often at odds with the empirical findings (e.g. Evans Cameron 2023, Herlihy et al 2023).

Over the coming years, the PRE Project’s interdisciplinary team of legal scholars and psychologists will be translating key psychology research findings into evidence for use in refugee hearings. By bringing this crucial evidence to bear, the PRE Project will help to reduce the proportion of wrongful rejections in refugee status decisions.

This work is part of the Bridging Divides project.

 

Denying refugee status: inferences and assumptions
(Prof. Hilary Evans Cameron and Dr. Jane Herlihy)

In Canada and elsewhere, most decisions to deny refugee status rest on a finding that the claimant was lying (Evans Cameron 2023). This project explores the law and psychology of deception judgments in the refugee status context.

  • How do decision-makers decide that a refugee claimant is lying?
  • What inferences do they rely on to justify these conclusions?
  • What assumptions underlie these inferences, and how well-founded are these assumptions?
  • What legal structures constrain the drawing of such inferences, and what normative principles should guide the development of these structures?

This project looks to the field of cognitive psychology, to the law of evidence, and to logics of legal reasoning to improve the law and practice of refugee status decision-making. Earlier work on this project was funded by grants from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Ongoing work is now part of the Bridging Divides project.

Academy of Medical Sciences GCRF Network grant: Infusing Law and Policy with the Voices of Displaced Survivors of Sexual Violence in Conflict
(Prof. Jill Marshall and Dr Ndagire, University of Makerere, Kampala.)

Thanks to an amazing community of educators, activists and most importantly survivors of conflict related sexual violence (CRSV). This project involves listening to and learning from the lived experiences of those survivors in Uganda, home to the largest group of refugees in the world, having fled from many conflicts and countries in the region. Prof Marshall and Dr Ndagire established links between our research teams and institutions and are joint principal investigators on the grant. They have worked with the Regional Training Facility of the Great Lakes Region and a local illustrator to capture artistic representations of survivors’ voices.

Ethics and the Law of Algorithms
(Prof. Jill Marshall, Dr Stefanie Kuenzel, Xiaoyu Zhang, Diego Martinez Castro and José-Rodrigo Córdoba-Pachón.

The project team sought to explore what intricacies and issues emerge in diverse contexts when digital algorithms – computer programmes with ‘intelligent’ technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Chatbots, Datamining – are designed or tasked to manage if not predict the digital workload and behaviour of (a) households; (b) professionals, including within the legal community where human trust and relationships, confidentiality and judgement have been critical; and (c) marginalised communities (the unemployed, ill).