Select Projects
Our work draws on more than a decade of research led by Abigail and, more recently, projects delivered through AB Research Consultancy.
The projects below offer a snapshot of this work. Each began with a different question, involved different methods and was commissioned for a different purpose.
What they share is a commitment to helping organisations understand complex issues well enough to take informed action.
When almost any photograph can become a weapon
Commissioned by Chayn | 2025–2026
Image-based abuse is widely understood as the non-consensual sharing of nude or sexually explicit images. But what happens when that definition doesn't reflect how harm is actually experienced? For millions of women around the world, almost any photograph can be weaponised. The harm comes not only from what an image shows, but from who holds it, who sees it, and what meaning can be imposed on it.
Working across Pakistan and the Pakistani diaspora, this research explored how ‘ordinary’ photographs and videos, including a selfie, a video of women dancing at a wedding, a photo of a woman sitting next to a male colleague, and images generated by AI, can become tools of abuse within particular cultural and social contexts. Through qualitative interviews with survivors, community members, lawyers, activists and technology companies, the research challenged assumptions underpinning platform policies and legal definitions of image-based abuse. It mapped the cultural, social, and contextual forces that determine what counts as harmful, and why platforms, laws, and support services so often fail to recognise it.
Alongside the report, we developed the first taxonomy of image-based abuse in Pakistan, documenting the full range of images capable of causing harm in this context.
What happened next
The findings are informing advocacy with technology companies, policymakers and civil society organisations, while the taxonomy is already being used by trust and safety professionals to inform platform policy.
Why are the young people with the greatest mental health needs often the least able to access support?
Commissioned by the Youth Endowment Fund | 2024–2025
Young people involved in or at risk of serious youth violence often experience significant mental health difficulties, yet many struggle to access appropriate support.
This mixed-methods study combined literature reviews, secondary analysis of national administrative datasets, qualitative research with more than 100 participants, and mapping of voluntary and community sector services to understand why.
The research highlighted how restrictive thresholds, fragmented and difficult to navigate systems, long waiting times, repeated referral rejections, a fear of working with risk and a mismatch between clinical models and how young people express distress continue to leave many without the support they need. It also highlighted how these barriers are exacerbated by stigma, fear of criminalisation, and the disproportionate impact on racially minoritised young people, those in care, and those living in poverty.
What happened next
The report makes practical recommendations for policymakers, commissioners, and service leads. The findings have informed regional advocacy and are continuing to support conversations about improving access to mental health support for young people across England and Wales.
How do you demonstrate the value of work built on relationships?
Commissioned by the Asian Women's Resource Centre (AWRC) | 2026
For more than forty-five years, AWRC has supported Black and minoritised women experiencing domestic abuse and harmful practices. Yet until recently, the organisation had never been the subject of a comprehensive piece of institutional research.
This project documented not only what AWRC does, but how it works, the difference it makes, and how and why its model contributes to important change. Drawing together interviews with survivors, staff and trustees, focus groups, surveys and creative methods, the research built a detailed picture of an organisation whose impact is relational, cumulative, and often difficult to capture through conventional performance metrics.
The findings document both the difference AWRC makes to the women it supports, from immediate safety and practical stability through to restored confidence, agency and hope, and the wider structural conditions that make its work both necessary and increasingly difficult to sustain. The report makes recommendations for funders, commissioners and policymakers, and makes a case for specialist by-and-for organisations to be recognised and resourced as distinct and irreplaceable parts of the domestic abuse system.
What happened next
The report is due for publication in Autumn 2026. It will support conversations with funders, commissioners and policymakers while preserving an important part of the organisation's history for future staff, trustees and the communities it serves.
What can government learn from the people working at the edges of the system?
Commissioned by Barrow Cadbury, in collaboration with Kinship Works & Future Governance Forum | Ongoing
Across the UK, community organisations are often developing creative responses to social problems long before those approaches are recognised by formal institutions. Innovative, relational, and adaptive ways of working have consistently emerged, often in direct response to the failures of the system around them.
This research explores what government can learn from those organisations. Through qualitative research with civil society organisations, community intermediaries and government actors, using Birmingham as a deep-dive case study, the project examines what is working and why, how community knowledge cam contribute to better public services, what lessons might transfer to how government operates and what prevents those lessons being adopted more widely.
The research sits alongside a wider diagnostic of where and how public services are currently falling short, bringing the two strands together to develop practical recommendations for central government, combined authorities, local authorities, and civil society organisations themselves.
What happens next
The report is due for publication in November 2026. The research will inform recommendations for central government, combined authorities, local government and civil society when the report is published.
When the systems designed to protect migrant women become part of the problem
Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship, University of Valencia | 2022–2024
This programme of research explored the relationship between migration, intimate partner violence and mental health among migrant women living in Spain. It asked both individual and systemic questions: how does the type of violence women experience shape their mental health outcomes, and how do the systems they encounter (legal, bureaucratic, and social) compound or alleviate that harm?
The project combined quantitative and qualitative methods, including a cross-sectional survey examining the relationship between IPV type and mental health outcomes, and an investigation into women’s experiences of accessing support for both violence and mental health. Alongside this, the research investigated bureaucratic violence within residency application processes, asking how administrative systems intended to provide protection can themselves become additional sources of harm.
The project included participatory art therapy workshops with survivors, culminating in a co-created public art exhibition. The exhibition gave participants a space to process and represent their experiences on their own terms and brought the research into public view.
What happened next
The research has resulted in multiple peer-reviewed publications, informed wider discussions around support processes for migrant survivors of violence and created public-facing outputs designed to reach audiences beyond academia.
