I’m Helen Easton, I’m a senior Lecturer in criminology at London South Bank University, I teach on criminology
and sociology units at undergraduate level, and I’ve been responsible over the last
couple of years as a course director for the criminology and social research methods masters.
I’ve also worked at this university as a researcher for a long time so since 2005 I’ve
been doing research, contracted research with government and different charities and different
organisations in relation to crime and justice so that is work that i bring directly into
the university and into my teaching.
Our undergraduate programme in criminology can be combined with other topic areas so
sociology, law, psychology, politics and so on. Our first year we cover a range of different
issues, one is to look at social research methods but the core content in the first
semester of the first year is to look at the problem of crime and to see how crime is made
up and what sort of things go into creating a crime and the second module is looking at
issues relating to crime so particular topics and particular areas of interests. We asses
in the first year usually through small assignment early on, so people get feedback early on.
One of those is responding at crime data that we get from the British crime survey and one
of those is looking at conducting a crime survey in small groups with fellow students
to have a look at crime and how it appears in real life.
Our criminology students come to us, come to us for a range of different reasons; they
are interested in criminology, they may have a background in relation to crime themselves,
live in a high crime community for instance. They come to south bank and the benefit of
them coming here is that they get to work with experts in the fields people doing research
that's making a difference in terms of crime policy for instance, so i've been researching
exiting prostitution and informing government policy making around prostitution laws for
instance. We also bring in expertise from our criminology society that's very active
bringing in expert speakers from other university and other areas of expertise to come and talk
to our students and engage with our students on a very personal level at our crim society
events which the students seem to really enjoy and get a lot of benefit from because they
get to see other experts not just the ones that are here.
Our students come to south bank because of its central London location the location is
wonderful because it's across the river from parliament, we're at the center of a multi-national
diverse city and our student body are very diverse it's very reflective of the city in
which the university is based, they come onto our programmes because of that location, because
of the diversity that is here but i also think they come because the university offers such
a wonderful range of support services and ways of engaging students so there are wonderful
services available to the students at the university that have been put in place and
our students seem to particularly benefit from and make them feel confident about going out into the world when they graduate.
Our criminology students have a whole array of different places they can go on and look
for work and we can help them with that so we have students who follow more traditional
routes into the police, into the probation service, the prison service or central government
policy, those sorts of things. But we also have students who take on and achieve a whole
host of different work opportunities and that can be helped by us, we can help them because
we have strong relationships with third sector organisations or with charities or businesses
that deal with issues connected to crime. We also have knowledge of the field and where
their sort of growing opportunities might be, we’ve had students go off and work in
local citizens advice bureau or working in prisons education trust to working in the
L.A police as a crime analyst for instance so there’s a whole host of different opportunities
and students can work with us because we have connections out into the real world if you
like that can support them and help them out into work.