Guest Lecture on ‘How forensic psychologists assess offenders: 35 years of drugs, sex, and violence’ by Dr Vincent Egan

The School of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Nicosia would like to invite you to a guest lecture on ‘How forensic psychologists assess offenders: 35 years of drugs, sex, and violence’ on Thursday, 3 November 2022 at 17:00 in Cine Studio. The guest lecture will be held by Dr Vincent Egan – now in private practice; up to 2020, Associate Professor of Forensic Psychology Practice at the Centre for Forensic and Family Psychology, University of Nottingham, UK.

Over his career he has combined academic, clinical, and forensic psychology career pathways, working in prisons, hospitals, and universities. The early work used neuropsychology and neurophysiological methods to assess the emergence of AIDS-dementia complex in HIV-positive injecting drug users. Over the decades, trends and patterns in drug use and its relation to offending have become apparent; as drug use and misuse continues to be a concern for the authorities, these insights are welcome. His hospital work involved being lead psychologist on a personality disorder ward in a medium secure unit for 4 years, the patients having been detained as mentally disordered offenders following violent offences committed against other persons. This enabled a strong sense of where diagnoses are helpful – and when they are not.  The context refined his risk assessment evaluations, enabling prioritisation of certain data when in fast-moving, low information situations.  Across all of this has been the perennial nature of “hands-on”/“hands-off” sexual offences, which show changes with the emergence of new technologies. A strong and evidence-based structure is vital in legal work, as you may well end up having to defend your work in a critical setting, and in this context, rejecting empirical and scientifically-based methods is a high-risk strategy.