Meet Our Research Champions
Details of the partners and organisations involved in our project.
Johanna Aimse
I am a research assistant for Dr Davey and Dr Bolaki in the Artist's Book Project, delivered jointly by the University of Essex and the University of Kent. In this project, I support the project team with correspondence. I have contributed to the research and development of the project, by liaising with stakeholders, collecting feedback, providing support at events including note-taking and transcribing. I am a University of Essex graduate with a First Class Honours degree. I am currently working towards becoming a solicitor and I am in the process of taking my SQE qualification. I have assisted members of the public and legal professionals in my former capacity as a student adviser in legal advice clinics at both the University of Essex and the University of Law. In addition to my legal experience, I am a qualified mediator in the UK allowing me to help to solve conflicts as a third party.
Karen Constantine
In 1978 Karen had just turned fifteen, she became pregnant and was sent to a Catholic-run mother and baby home. Many miles from home, friends and her school, it was a world apart from all she knew. Whilst in St. Paul’s, she was tasked with daily laundry; no-one prepared her for the baby’s birth, let alone discussed options open to her. Instead, Karen was repeatedly told she should be ashamed of what she’d done, to accept that her baby would be much better off, would have the life he deserved, the life she couldn’t possibly give him, that he should be adopted.
Karen didn’t agree. She realised, many decades later, that she was extremely lucky. Somehow she managed to keep her baby. However, her reputation within her family and community never recovered. Her educational aspirations were terminated. Friends were warned to stay away from her. Karen and her baby were written off.
She was free to fulfil the endless warnings that she had ruined her own life.
Many years later, Karen discovered just how many other young women and girls were forced into mother and baby homes, and was shocked at how many had their babies taken from them.
In 2023 Karen discovered and joined the Movement for an Adoption Apology, determined to do whatever she could and make a positive difference in her remaining time serving as a Labour Kent County Councillor.
In November 2024 her first book was published. Taken: Experiences of Forced Adoption, combines the contemporary social and political background with the raw, powerful and almost unbelievable real life experiences of women who had their babies taken, and details the lifelong trauma of the abhorrent practices on both mothers and adoptees.
Karen is a regular columnist for her local newspaper and Chartist magazine. She also posts on her personal and political websites. Read more and find Karen’s book at https://karenconstantine.co.uk/
Dr Lisa DeBlasio
Dr Lisa DeBlasio is a Lecturer in Law at the University of Plymouth. Lisa is passionate about working with people who are marginalised in society. She researches how the law affects them firsthand. Lisa is also involved in a number of student-facing roles where she works with students from deprived backgrounds and mental health challenges.
https://researchportal.plymouth.ac.uk/en/persons/lisa-deblasio
Diana Defries
Born and brought up in North London, Diana is an artist and illustrator who learned to build websites, when the internet was newer and shinier than it is now.
She’s a campaigner with the Movement for an Adoption Apology, which is pressing the UK government for a full, formal Public Apology and a range of supportive measures all those affected by forced and coerced adoption in the post WW2 decades.
The campaign is close to her heart as she lost her daughter to forced adoption in 1974, shortly after her 17th birthday. Diana and her daughter have since been reunited.
Diana featured in the ITV documentary series the Tonight Show in February 2025 in an episode titled 'Forced Adoption: Britain's Silent Scandal'. This can be viewed on itvX using the following link:
https://www.itv.com/watch/tonight/1a2803/1a2803a9439
Angela Frazer-Wicks
Angela Frazer-Wicks MBE is a birth mum, her eldest two children were adopted in 2004 after a very long and fraught battle with her Local Authority due to domestic violence and mental health issues. She is now married with a young daughter who has had no Local Authority involvement. In 2020 she was reunited with her eldest son. Angela is Chair of Trustees of Family Rights Group (FRG) and founding member of FRG’s parents panel. Angela is now a renowned advocate, trainer and expert on parents’ lived experience and has contributed a parent perspective to multiple high-profile debates on child protection and adoption, and to policy design and implementation. She was awarded an MBE in the King’s Birthday Honours List in 2023 for services to children and families.
Celestine Greenwood
Celestine ‘Celeste’ Greenwood is a barrister at Exchange Chambers. She has more than twenty years’ experience working in family law, in particular in public law proceedings, including adoption cases, several of which have been published. Celeste is passionate about developing the child protection and family justice system to reduce the need for formal court proceedings by better supporting families in the community and by improving access to justice, the experience of court proceedings and outcomes for families and children.
Currently she is undertaking doctoral research into family law reform to improve public law care proceedings.
Celeste brings a human rights approach to her work and is also very interested in how this approach and using feminist legal methodologies can produce more inclusive, fair and just experiences and outcomes.
She has been published extensively on legal subjects relating to family justice, human rights and her feminist legal rewriting of the judgment in the case of Radovan Karadic appears in a collection of international feminist judgments.
As well as advocacy and advice services Celeste also provides training, mentoring and consultative services, both at the international level (she has worked with judges of the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe) and at the national and local community level with organisations working to support parents and to eradicate poverty.
She has also worked overseas in development, access to justice, human rights and legal education with NGOs, international organisations and universities in Central Asia, the Pacific region, Afghanistan, the U.S.A and India.
Dr Paul McGrath
Dr Paul McGrath is a practicing social worker and social work researcher. Paul is currently the service manager of an emergency duty team. Paul’s area of research interest is kinship care, and the title of his PhD thesis was ‘Grandparents’ Experiences of Being a Special Guardian: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis’.
Paul spent the majority of his career working in child protection and family support as both a social worker and team manager. After completing his PhD, Paul spend three years as the policy and practice advisor for Kinship, the leading national kinship care charity. Paul continues to support Kinship as a volunteer and is a trustee for Opening Doors, a self-advocacy charity for people with learning disabilities.
Chloe Sparrow
Chloe Sparrow is an Art Psychotherapist and Clinical Supervisor, working in Essex. Chloe qualified in 2014 and currently works in private practice. She is HCPC registered and has experience in a variety of healthcare settings and charitable organisations, working with individuals and groups of all ages.
Amanda Swan
'I believe the approach to psychological health needs to be holistic. In the early days when I began my studies and working with vulnerable people, I felt strongly that emotional support needs to incorporate a psychophysiological perspective as well as an understanding of a person’s past experiences. The work I have been doing over the last twenty plus years involved supporting people of all ages in a variety of settings. This has been underpinned by different theories of working with people’s vulnerabilities, and has always sparked my attention in terms of their application and success rate. The different contexts I worked in gave me some amazing experience to draw upon so that I could go forward and create my own approach, which has driven me to enhance my skills and take those into private practice. I have previously worked with agencies such as Victim Support, Cruse Bereavement Care, in a school for special educational needs children who were often in the care system, youth and adult offending including sex offences, as a research assistant, and as a university and college lecturer. These experiences have shaped my holistic view and approach to emotionally supporting people. I believe it is important that clients feel heard, valued and understood as a whole person so that building a rapport and trust is a natural foundational process. This approach alone in my work has given rise to a successful therapy practice, known as Swan Therapy & Well-Being, where people attend sessions in safety and confidence. In addition to private practice, I have been working with the University of Kent and the University of Essex as a consulting counsellor and psychotherapist helping to support mothers who have experienced adoption. This has enabled me to listen to how people work and live as a result of forced adoption, and how adoption law and policy is understandably under the spot-light. In addition, I am beginning my own research project, looking at how hypnosis can be used as a modulator of emotion from a psychophysiological perspective. Building the Swan Therapy & Well-Being practice began with a cognitive seed of inspiration, built upon both personal and professional experience over more than 20 years. The practice has slowly grown and expanded so that I now specialise in more trauma based work using hypnosis as an emotional regulator as part of my everyday work, but not neglecting to cover and support people with ever growing anxiety based symptomatology as well as other issues besides. My work more specifically over the last 8 years has enabled the practice to become a well-established and well-respected therapeutic space where clients feel reassured that they will receive a therapeutic service they can trust.'
https://www.counselling-directory.org.uk/counsellors/amanda-swan and www.amandaswan.co.uk.
Dr Daniel Taggart
Dr Daniel Taggart is a clinical psychologist and academic. He has worked in a range of clinical settings, recently working with several Public Inquiries to engage with survivors of institutional harms. Daniel’s research focuses on how to maximise the impacts of lived experience involvement in Inquiry settings, the impacts of child sexual abuse on survivors, and how to best support mothers who have their children taken into care.
Jody Torode
Jody Torode qualified as a social worker in 2011. She has spent 11 years in various front line child protection roles across the country until finally settling in London where she remains to date. Through her social work practice, Jody realised her interest in the field of recurrent care proceedings, the multiple disadvantages mothers in this situation face and her desire to improve experiences of this cohort. Legislation and policy rightly highlight the child’s welfare as paramount in care decisions, yet this means parents’ needs can be overlooked, especially following the point of separation. Jody’s quest to better understand learning disabled mother’s experiences begin after identifying the disproportionate number of women with learning needs being referred to the recurrent care proceedings service she managed. Being alongside mothers with lived experience of child removal enabled Jody to hear their voices and experiences led her to question the interplay between different branches of public policy and practice. Legislation on disability, equality and child protection providing seemingly conflicting messages around inclusion and available support.