Rachel Lovell, PhD

Rachel Lovell (PhD, The Ohio State University, 2007) is a Research Assistant Professor at the Begun Center for Violence Prevention Research and Education at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences at Case Western Reserve University. She is a sociologist and methodologist who focuses on applied research and evaluation, working with law enforcement, community-based agencies, and public systems to examine the impact of violent behavior that is primarily directed at women and girls—in particular sexual assault, human sex trafficking, and intimate partner violence.

Dr. Lovell is currently the PI a large action research project on untested sexual assault kits in Cuyahoga County, Ohio in collaboration with the Cuyahoga County Sexual Assault Kit Task Force, with funding provided by the Bureau of Justice Assistance’s Sexual Assault Kit Initiative. She is also the PI on a recently awarded grant from the National Institute of Justice to employ machine learning technology to analyze the narratives of thousands of sexual assault police reports for “signaling” language regarding a victim’s credibility. She has also led evaluations of a sexual assault victim advocacy program and a juvenile human trafficking docket in Cuyahoga County.

She has presented findings from her research at national and international conferences in the criminology, mental/behavioral health, sociology, and related fields, at congressional briefings, and published these results in various professional journals.

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Curriculum Vitae

Q: Why is your work at the Begun Center important to you, to our community, and to the world? I am not sure I could ever go back to doing more traditional academic research after having been an applied researcher for so long, because applied work is at the core of making a change. In answering the question of ‘so what?’ the sociology I was taught often never engaged the community; we used secondary data sets to explore topics that interested us but we rarely thought about what it would mean or how to explain to others. It was for the sake of intellectual exercise. The work at Begun Center is so fulfilling because it has a direct application to make improvements, and you appeal directly to stakeholders.

Q: What is a cause about which you are particularly passionate? Gender inequality is at the core of most of what I do, in particular gender-based violence, including sexual harassment, workplace gender discrimination, rape, human trafficking, and intimate partner violence.