Dr Aravinda Kosaraju joined Kent Law School in 2018 as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. Dr Kosaraju’s research broadly focusses on violence against women and children; criminal justice and sexual offending. Dr Kosaraju is an ESRC scholar and her doctoral thesis examined the process of attrition in cases involving crimes of child sexual exploitation in England and Wales employing a Foucauldian Feminist theoretical framework.

Dr Kosaraju worked as the Policy and Research Officer for Parents against Child Sexual Exploitation (PACE), a UK national charity working to support families of sexually exploited children from 2005 to 2013. As a consultant to the Lawyer’s Collective/UNIFEM funded project titled Trafficking of women and children for commercial sexual exploitation, she coordinated research into the socio-legal aspects of prostitution in two of Asia’s largest red light districts of Mumbai and Delhi during 2001-03. She advocated for police reforms in India in her role as Project Officer for the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, an international non-governmental organization working to promote human rights across the Commonwealth.

Dr Kosaraju has extensive experience of developing training for criminal justice practitioners and also teaches modules in law and criminology. Dr Kosaraju has been a member of many consultative groups for the Department of Children, Schools and Families (DfES), Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and United Kingdom Human Trafficking Centre (UKHTC) contributing the development of policy around safeguarding children from sexual exploitation. She is the founding member of Support After Rape and Sexual Violence Leeds (SARSVL) and a former director of National Working Group for Sexually Exploited Children and Young People (NWG).