International conference on Cross-disciplinary Approaches to Online Child Protection

Carolina Villacampa is full Professor of Criminal Law and Victimology at the University of Lleida (Spain), where she has been teaching since 2002, when she became a senior lecturer. She has been director of the Department of Public Law and secretary general of this academic institution, where she currently acts as director of the master degree in criminal justice system. Since September 2022, Prof. Villacampa chairs the Law area of the Spanish State Agency of Research (AEI). She also acts as coordinator of the Victimology working group of the Spanish Society of Criminology. She obtained the Catalan Government ICREA Award in 2022 as recognition to her research activity. She is one of the most outstanding specialists in criminal law of her generation, being the sixth most cited researcher in Spain in the field of criminal law, procedural law and criminology, and the third by her h index according to Dialnet metrics.

She has an h index 30 in Google Scholar. She is ranked 3,402 of the 5,600 most cited Spanish and foreign female researchers in Spain in the ranking compiled by the CSIC (The Spanish National Research Council) based on the aforementioned index. For more than a decade, she combined her teaching activity at different Spanish, South American and European Universities with her jurisdictional activity as a substitute Magistrate at the Provincial Criminal Court of Lleida.

She has participated in 25 national and international research projects, having coordinated 13 of them. She has authored or co-authored around 200 national and international scientific publications, both in Spanish and English, dealing with the general and special part of criminal law, as well as victimological and criminal policy issues; concretely 21 books, 87 articles in Spanish and international indexed journals and 78 book chapters.

To date, she has supervised 6 doctoral theses, 3 of which have been awarded, respectively, with the extraordinary doctoral prize of the University of Lleida, the second prize in the Awards of the Spanish Government Delegation for Gender Violence for doctoral theses on violence against women and the award of the Catalan Observatory of Justice in Gender Violence for the best doctoral thesis defended in Catalonia in response to the criminal justice system in the face of gender violence.

She is currently supervising 7 more doctoral theses and has also supervised 37 master degree final projects. During the last decade, her research has focused on gender-based violence, human trafficking, legal policy on prostitution, online victimisation of minors and recognition of victim rights.

Nuria Lorenzo-Dus is Professor of Linguistics at Swansea University, Wales, UK. She specialises in using Linguistics methods, synergising them with methods from other Social and Computer Sciences, to develop ethically responsible and scalable technology to counter technology assisted child sexual exploitation and abuse. Her research has benefitted from substantial funding from government and charity organisations globally.

She is the author of several books, including a 2023 monograph titled Digital Grooming (Oxford University Press) and over 80 journal articles and book chapters in English and Spanish. She has received distinguished teaching awards and visiting professorships internationally. Nuria currently leads a research programme – DRAGON that brings together interdisciplinary research and practitioner teams from across the global to develop, evaluate and scale up technology to detect and prevent online sexual harassment between children and online child sexual grooming.

Ethel Quayle is Professor of Forensic Clinical Psychology in the School of Health in Social Science at the University of Edinburgh. A clinical psychologist who has worked with both sex offenders and victims,  for over 20 years she has researched technology-mediated crimes against children, collaborating internationally with government and non-government agencies in the context of research, policy and practice.

Recent EU-funded research examined the function of coercive and non-coercive self-produced sexual images, NSPCC-funded research on deterrence of online sexual offending and current NIHR-funded research, i-MINDS, a digital intervention for OCSA victims. She plays an active role in a number of UK Home Office and Scottish government organisations.