Dr. HELEN BAKER

Dr Helen Baker is Co-Subject Lead and Programme Leader for Criminology which involves the administration and oversight of all Criminology programmes, their quality assurance and compliance and the student experience for these. As Co-Subject Lead, Helen led the revalidation of Criminology programmes recently. Helen has been a member of the academic staff at Edge Hill University since September 2010. She graduated from the University of Lancaster with an LLB Honours in Law in 1997 before completing a PhD in Law and Women’s Studies, funded by the ESRC which was both an empirical and theoretical study on women’s experiences of domestic violence entitled 'Revisiting and resisting Men's Violence to Women: Shame and Self-Regulatory Practices'. Helen began her academic career at The University of Liverpool where she successfully ran the Feminist Legal Research Unit (FLRU) resulting in a number of publications and eminent guest speakers. Gendered violence and abuse is a research area in which she maintains a current and long-standing interest including in her teaching. She also worked at Blackburn College and The University of Lancaster in the past.

In 2003, she was a co-researcher on a Save the Children project on children’s experiences of domestic violence service provision, together with Professor Helen Stalford, and Professor Fiona Beveridge (now retired). The project began a particular interest in the needs of children and young people in relation to domestic violence laws and service provision; an area in which she has researched ever since. She has conducted research on the needs of teenage boys in relation to domestic violence and on their construction with reference to child-to-parent violence. Most recently she was an academic member of the multi-agency practicioner Advisory Board for the Child-to-Adolescent Violence and Abuse (CAPVA) research project at Liverpool John Moores University led by Professor Zara Twigg and funded by the Merseyside Violence Reduction Partnership (MVRP), who published their report in 2025 and Helen continues to be involved with this work through invited events such as conferences. Due to her research expertise in this area, Helen was also in 2025 invited to share her knowledge to guide Merseyside Youth Association with resource development and training scheme of works and was invited to Key Liverpool City Region Events on this subject for which she engaged with other academics and community sector organisations.

Helen's current work examines structural violence through the gendered harms of the pharmaceutical industry for which she is currently under contract to write a sole authored monograph for Routledge entitled 'Gendered Pharmaceutical Harms: A Foucauldian Feminist and Zemiological Perspective' for REF29, and also continues to work in the construction of women who experience violence and abuse under the criminal law. Following her invited presentation at a recent academic and practicioner event, she is currently collaborating with Dr. Susie Marriott on a research article on pharmaceutical harms and marketing of weight loss products for REF29. Helen has also written a forthcoming chapter with Dr. Eleanor Peters on the relationship between music and violence and abuse against women and girls in The Palgrave Handbook of Violence Against Women and Girls which will be published in 2026. Helen is also regularly asked to review journal articles including for the Journal of Gender Based Violence and Criminology and Criminal Justice, proposed books and grant applications in her areas of research expertise.

Helen is a member of the HiGSS department at EHU. She is also a member of The Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA), The British Society for Criminology (BSC) and The European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control (EG) and has attended and presented at the annual conferences for these many times.

Due to her long-standing interests and expertise in gendered violence and abuse, Helen has been invited to speak at many practitioner conferences as a result of her specialist knowledge including for regional and national Children’s Services, Safeguarding Children Initiatives and Safer Communities Partnerships during her academic career. 

Helen has a vast range of teaching, supervisory experience and expertise across all levels of undergraduate and postgraduate study. 

Helen has also been an external examiner for both undergraduate and postgraduate research degrees in the past at St. Helen’s College, Liverpool John Moores University and Aberystwyth University respectively. Helen has a Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching from the University of Liverpool and is also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. 

Helen is supervisor for EHU Graduate Teaching Assistant Emily Hayes for her PhD on women and crime in 19th-century England, with a particular interest in gender and sexual violence. Emily's PhD adopts an interdisciplinary approach, integrating historical and criminological methods to examine cases of sexual violence in Victorian Liverpool between 1880 and 1910. 

Helen currently teaches on the following modules at undergraduate level: 

CRI1142 Key Criminological Thinkers (contributes to teaching)

CRI1143 Histories of Crime, Policing and Punishment (Module Leader)

CRI2232 Crime, Harms, Law and Justice (Module Leader)

SPY3140 Dissertation - Supervisor to L6 students 

CRI3121 Corporate Crime (Pharmaceutical Harms and Health and Safety Harms)

CRI3112 Justice, Rights and the State (contributes to teaching)

Helen has over 20 years of teaching experience and expertise gained from her academic career at teaching at every level of study and has taught criminology, law and women's studies modules during her career. 

Helen has in the past, and currently also supervises Master's and PhD students in her areas of expertise.