Tom Fisher joined Lucy Faithfull Foundation as our new Director of Research earlier this year. Here, he shares why research matters to LFF – and why we’ll be focusing more on what we still don’t know about preventing child sexual abuse.
What's your background?
I’ve spent 15 years evaluating programmes and policies that prevent harm, abuse and violence around the world. In the academic world, I’m closest to a sociologist – I think about how problems such as harmful sexual behaviour relate to our social norms, our structures and institutions. I’m interested in the nature of prevention: how to influence the actions and attitudes of whole societies in ways that stop harm from happening.
I’ve joined LFF from an international research centre where I led lots of interesting community research for governments and charities. I started off working on prejudice, anti-racism and poverty research in the UK and became interested in how violence and abuse arose from issues of power, desperation and identity. Since then, I’ve worked on a set of international issues including radicalisation, online grooming, refugee protection and peacebuilding across Europe, East Africa and Central Asia.
I’ve most often been embedded within charity programmes. That meant spending lots of time with amazing professionals like those at LFF who support people through the most desperate and vulnerable points of their lives.
Why does research matter?
There are many gaps in our knowledge which prevent us from protecting children more effectively. What role can technology companies play in preventing the spread of sexual images of children online? Which types of deterrence messaging are most effective? What role can early intervention have in stopping abuse?
There are also many voices missing from the evidence base. There are gaps in our understanding of adverse childhood experiences, disability and deprivation. We don’t understand enough about offenders, especially women. Importantly for my background in community development, there’s a lack of participatory research involving young people. We know that the environment in which young people are growing up is wildly different to those of previous generations – they need safe places to discuss sexual norms and behaviour.
Understanding these missing voices, technological threats, and normative shifts is absolutely essential for preventing abuse. Without this knowledge, services are pushed towards reactive, short-term responses. For me, research is the only answer.
What interested you about LFF?
I liked LFF’s boldness. The Foundation has great confidence in defining what it does, for whom and why. That makes it a great place for evaluation: the team already knows what success looks like.
There are also opportunities for research at LFF that don’t exist in most charities. For a sociologist, an organisation that works closely and innovatively with offenders provides crucial opportunities to understand the nature of abuse and its connection with everything from technology reliance to structural inequality.
The biggest draw is that LFF is in the unique position of regularly having contact with people who haven’t yet offended and are reaching out for help. I’ve worked across many policy fields and have rarely seen an organisation that can reach that hidden group so effectively. Understanding what makes someone contact LFF in those situations is critical to advancing our knowledge of abuse prevention for this field and many others. There’s a lot to learn through researching LFF’s approach and experience.
Why is LFF investing in research?
We want to keep enhancing our work, and we need to stay ahead of an ever-changing problem.
We work in an incredibly challenging area, and it matters greatly that everything LFF does is guided by evidence. The issue of child sexual abuse changes all the time. Research in this field has struggled to keep pace with the complex changes in offending. The rapid growth of technology-assisted harm, the overwhelming presence of social media in our lives and the increased availability of child sexual abuse material mean we have a clearer need for evidence than ever before.
“Thanks to a great research team and its supporters, LFF is one of a few organisations in this field that’s in a position to make a difference here. Child sexual abuse is a growing problem around the world. For me, the Foundation has a duty to push the field along with research. LFF can prevent the devastating effects of child sexual abuse through both its support and its evidence.
What are you hoping to achieve through research at LFF?
There’s already a huge amount of evaluation and research happening here, but the Foundation is ready for a new, more strategic approach to research. Our research team is beyond talented, and there are some great opportunities coming up for new research this year. My main aim is to make research a bigger part of LFF’s work.
For evaluation, that means bringing together insights from across the Foundation. What can we learn from comparing the work we do with families in Wales with the support for young people through our Shore website? What measures help us understand our impact across the many different types of support LFF provides? How can we get data on the longer-term impact of our services?
I’ll also be pushing for more curiosity-driven research. LFF practitioners see the shifting trends of this issue in front of them every day – we need to put those insights at the centre of some great research.
Research partnerships will be central to this, especially with universities. LFF’s new strategy puts partnership at the heart of all our work. That’s an exciting push to collaborate with researchers around the world, allowing us to take a bigger, more international look at child sexual abuse.
Our new strategy is, happily, very research-focused. There’s a bold ambition for research and evaluation to be behind everything we do. The strategy gives LFF a renewed commitment to understanding the complexity and extent of child sexual abuse – something I’m thrilled to play a leading role in.
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