Professor Kevin Browne talks about his international work on institutional childcare practices

Your current position is Professor of Forensic Psychology and Child Health at the University of Nottingham, but you didn’t start out in that field. Can you take me through the sequence of events that led you into forensic psychology? 

My PhD was on the ethology of aggression, using direct observational approaches like sequential analysis of behaviour and cluster analysis to investigate the biological function of aggression in animals. Child psychologists started to get interested in these ethological techniques to look at parent/offspring interactions. So a number of us started to shift from ethology and behavioural biology to child psychology, applying these techniques to parent/child interactions and child behaviour in the 1980s. 

My first introduction to forensic psychology was when I was awarded a Medical Research Council fellowship in 1983, to look at interaction in aggressive and non-aggressive families with a view to detecting families at risk of child maltreatment. The project was carried out at the University of Surrey, which was my first post-doc position. Interestingly the funders insisted we go in blind to the aggression status of the family (high risk or low risk). I managed to avoid any untoward experiences except one where a live-in boyfriend set the Alsatian on me. I managed to get the laptop into the dog’s mouth as it bit. I still have the laptop but it’s got tooth marks where the dog broke its teeth and ran off! This experience enhanced my sense of respect for the difficult work of social workers and health visitors.

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