Professor Betsy Stanko OBE is the Strategic Advisor to the National Operating Model for the Investigation of Rape and Sexual Offence, for which she was the co-architect. Along with Professor Katrin Hohl, she worked for the past three years as academic lead to Operation Soteria Bluestone, funded by the Home Office, which designed the new operating model for the response to and the investigation of rape and sexual assault in England and Wales as authorised professional practice.
For nearly a decade and a half, she worked inside the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime and the London Metropolitan Police Service’s Corporate Development, establishing a social research function alongside performance analysis for improving crime and justice in London, heading Insight and Evidence for MOPAC from 2014-16, before retiring from the civil service. For over 25 years, she was a professor of criminology, teaching and researching at Clark University (USA), Brunel University, Cambridge University and Royal Holloway, University of London (where she is an Emeritus Professor of Criminology). 1997-2002, she was the Director of the ESRC Violence Research Programme. She is a Visiting Professor in City University London’s Sociology Department, Sheffield Hallam’s Law Department.
Professor Stanko has been awarded several academic lifetime achievement awards, including the prestigious American Society of Criminology’s Vollmer Award (1996), recognising her outstanding influence on criminal justice practice in policing violence against women. She received an OBE in 2014 for her services to policing. In 2018, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Sheffield Hallam University.