I joined the University of Bristol in 1993 following an undegraduate degree in history, politics and economics and postgraduate studies in criminal justice, both at the University of Southampton.

I have been a member of the School for Policy Studies since its formation (previously I was in the Department of Social Policy) and have been part of the Centre for the Study of Poverty and Social Justice. I currently serve as the School's Deputy Head of School. Beyond the School I am member of the Bristol Poverty Institute, the Faculty Research Group on Gender, and was one of founder members of the Bristol Research on Female Genitial Cutting. I support the activities of Bristol University Press as Academic Editor for Criminology.

Since the late 1990s, I have been part of a group of academics developing zemiology - a new disciplinay area within the social sciences focused on social harm. In 2004, with my co-editors (Paddy Hillyard, Steve Tombs and David Gordon) we published Beyond Criminology: Taking Harm Seriously (Pluto Press) which laid down the foundations of this new approach. Currently, I co-edit the Bristol University Press (BUP) Book Series Studies in Social Harm and co-ordinate the activities of the Working Group on Social Harm for the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control.

My career over the last 25 years has focused on researching two broad areas : poverty, social exclusion and inequality; and crime, harm and criminalisation, and their overlaps. My work has included research on the criminalisation of poverty (particularly gendered poverty), the development of counter-terrorism law and policy and its impacts on religious and ethnic minority communities. More recently my work has focused on state responses to female genital cutting and its impact on marginalised and vulnerable communities.