Dom Willmott is a Reader (Associate Professor) in Legal and Criminological Psychology, interested in bias within legal decision-making. His main specialism is jury decision-making within sexual offence trials alongside investigating the impact of rape myths and broader social cognitions that underpin gender-based violence supportive attitudes and behaviour. He has published more than 100 research outputs and received over £5 million pounds in funding to carry out his research.
Dom joined Loughborough University’s Department of Criminology in April 2022 as a Senior Lecturer in Criminology, primarily teaching on the BSc Criminology degree. Before this he taught Forensic Psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University and the University of Huddersfield. His PhD examined fairness and functionality of juror decision-making within English rape trials.
Dom is Visiting Professor of Psychology at SWPS University in Poland and Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society, awarded in recognition of the contributions he has made to the discipline of Psychology. In January 2023, Dom was selected to be a founding member of the Royal Society’s newly established UK Young Academy, a network of researchers from across the UK said to have made significant contributions to their respective fields. UKYA members are tasked with identifying innovative interdisciplinary solutions to help tackle the biggest challenges that face global societies, during their five-year tenure.
Dom is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Criminal Psychology and Associate Editor of Frontiers in Psychology (Forensic and Legal Psychology Section). He also serves on the Editorial Board of a number of other international publications including the Journal of Criminal Justice and The Police Journal.
Dom is Chair of the Board of Trustee’s for Justice is Now, a registered charity aiming to improve outcomes for victim-survivors of sexual violence in the UK and previously served as Research Advisor to Dame Vera Baird, during her tenure as the Victim Commissioner for England and Wales (2020-2022).
Dom continues to work closely with collaborators and practitioners in the US, Australia, Canada, Poland, the UK and the Caribbean on law reform initiatives designed to reduce bias in legal decision-making and improve access to justice for victims of gender-based violence around the world.
Dom’s main research interests involve examining bias within criminal legal systems alongside attempting to measure and reduce prejudicial attitudes which underpin gender-based violence throughout global societies. He regularly consults government agencies and NGO’s in the UK and abroad on such issues.
Between 2017 - 2022 he was a Co-Investigator on a large UKRI GCRF multi-country research project tasked with developing and evaluating prosocial computer games that sought to educate young people about varied forms of gendered violence. As part of this research, the None-in-Three Project, Dom and his colleagues carried out primary research and educative interventions with more than 20,000 children and young adults in Uganda, India, Jamaica, and the UK.
Since then, in collaboration with researchers at Tsinghua University in China, as well as Lancaster University, King’s College London, Glasgow Caledonian University, and SWPS University in Poland, he has received both small and large-scale funding to further investigate varying aspects of public and juror biases towards victims of sexual and intimate partner violence. Alongside collaborators at Lancaster University, he recently secured prestigious funding from the Economic and Social Research Council to examine jury-decision making within sexual offence trials where men are the victims of violence perpetrated by other men and women. This project ran from 2023 to 2026 and was the first study of its kind to examine jury decision-making in sexual assault trials where men were complainants of sexual violence. Dom also recently completed a British Academy funded research project alongside collaborators at King’s College London and Glasgow Caledonian University, examining the impact of racial, sexuality and rape myth biases in English rape trials. Dom continues to work on interventions tasked with addressing juror biases in adult rape trials and is currently partnered with academics, practitioners and policymakers from the UK, the US and Australia in seeking further funding to carry out this research.
External Research Funding
ESRC - £438,634.72 (2023 – 2026)
- Trial by gender? Examining jury decision making in rape of male victims
King’s Mental Health and Psychological Science Fund - £24,743 (2026)
- Jury Deliberations in Rape Trials: Analysing the role of sexuality and race
Polish Academy of Psychological Science - 29,500 PL (2026)
- Psychopathic Personality Norms among a Representative UK Sample
National Social Science Fund of China - 200,000 CYN (2023 – 2026)
- Assessing the Causes and Effective Interventions for IPV in China.
British Academy - £9,897.00 (2023 – 2025)
- Exploring Defendant Race and Complainant Sexuality on Juror Judgments.
AHRC (GCRF) - £4.3 Million (2017 – 2022)
- Testing the effectiveness of pro-social computer games to tackle GBV.
ESRC IAA - £13,080.00 (2020 – 2021)
- Assessing public perceptions towards male victims of sexual violence.
British Academy - £9,966.00 (2020 – 2021)
- Investigating public attitudes towards rape justice.
At Loughborough University Dom delivers teaching on a range of topics and is the Programme Leader for Postgraduate Taught courses Including Loughborough University’s MSc in Criminology.
Dom contributes to teaching on the following modules:
- Forensic Psychology (Module Leader)
- Responding to Sexual Violence (Module Leader)
- Psychology and Law
- Violence and Violent Crime
- Understanding Punishment: Criminal Justice in E&W
- Criminology Dissertations
- How to win at Criminology and Sociology
- Becoming a Criminologist
- Sports Criminology
Dominic is available to supervise PhD projects investigating; various aspects of jury decision-making in sexual offence trials, the nature and prevalence of rape myths among varied global populations; attitudes towards sexual and domestic violence in the CJS; offending behaviour and motivations; bias within criminal legal systems.
Completed PhD Students
- Dr Gareth Ross – Criminal Social Identity and Identity Change in Indeterminately Sentenced Prisoners: Quantitative and Qualitative Insights across Prison Environments (Awarded 2026).
- Dr Hannah Lorimer – An investigation into the development, prevalence, and maintenance of criminal social identity (CSI) in an adult male prison population. (Awarded 2026).
- Dr Lucie Homer – “A lost cause, or more an effect?” Exploring the factors underpinning involvement in serious and organised crime groups (Awarded 2025).
- Dr Georgia Barnett – Testing psychological interventions in prison and probation settings using experimental methods (Awarded 2024).
- Dr Catherine Phillips – An examination of the impact of language, rape myth beliefs and juror education on decision-making within rape trials(Awarded 2024).
- Dr Lara Hudspith – Justice for Rape Victim-Survivors: Exploring the Need for a Court-Based Intervention to Address Jurors' Rape Myth Acceptance(Awarded 2022).
- Dr Russell Woodfield – Profiling Trauma and the Associated Mental Health Outcomes in Prison Personnel(Awarded 2020).
Current PhD Candidates
- Gill Kirkman – An investigation of Adolescent Dating Violence and Attitudes (ADVA) among UK adolescents.
- Eleanor Manhong Li – Investigating the Prevalence and Impact of Rape Myths in China: What Role does Confucian Culture Play?
- Alex Paradise – Consumption of Virtual Reality Indecent Images of Children and the Risk of Offending Escalation
Selected Works on Jury Decision Making
- Willmott, D., Boduszek, D. & Booth., N. (2026). Profiling Jury Bias in Rape Trials: Examining the link between Juror Characteristics and Trial Decisions. In E. Dowds, S. Weare & S. Leahy (Eds.). Researching Rape Trials: Methods, Ethics and Empirical Perspectives. London: Routledge.
- Headd, S., & Willmott, D. (2026). Do pre-trial juror attitudes predict rape trial verdict decisions? Investigating the role of rape myth beliefs, contemporary sexist attitudes and sexual victimisation experiences on juror decision-making. British Journal of Criminology.
- Willmott, D. & Woodhams, R. (2026). Stranger Rape or Impromptu Consensual Sex? Investigating Mock Juror Decision-Making in a Genuine Contested Rape Trial. Behavioral Sciences & the Law.
- Weare, S., Millar, M. & Willmott, D. (2026). Jury Decision Making in Forced to Penetrate Trials. Policy Brief: Lancaster University Press.
- Willmott, D., Curley, L., & Widanaralalage, K. (2026). Jury Decision Making. In Fido, D., Zangeneh, M., & Spenser, K. (2026). Core Foundations and Contemporary Issues in Forensic Psychology: A Handbook for Students, Trainees, and Practitioners (pp. 349-366). Springer Nature: Switzerland.
- Richardson, E., Jenkins, L. & Willmott, D. (2025). Rape Myths, Jury Deliberations, and Conversation Analysis: Examining conversational practices used to undermine rape complaints within (mock) jury deliberations. Journal of Criminal Justice, 99,
- Weare, S., Willmott, D. & Millar, M. (2025). Jury Decision Making in Male Rape Trials. Policy Brief: Lancaster University Press.
- Millar, M., Weare, S. & Willmott, D. (2025). Jurors’ determinations of guilt in sexual offences involving male victims: A systematic review. Trauma, Violence and Abuse.
- Hudspith, L., Wager, N., Willmott, D., & Gallagher, B. (2024). The Impact of Rape Myth Education on Jury Decision-Making: A Systematic Review. Trauma, Violence & Abuse.
- Lilley, C., Willmott, D. & Mojtahedi, D. (2023). Juror Characteristics on Trial: Investigating how Psychopathic Traits, Rape Attitudes, Victimisation Experiences and Juror Demographics influence Decision-Making in an Intimate Partner Rape Trial. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 13, 1086026.
- Hudspith, L., Wager, N., Willmott, D., & Gallagher, B. (2023). Forty Years of Rape Myth Acceptance Interventions: A Systematic Review of What Works in Naturalistic Institutional Settings and How this can be Applied to Educational Guidance for Jurors. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 24(2), 981-1000.
- Daly, E., Smith, O., Bows, H., Brown, J., Chalmers, J., Cowan, S., Horvath, M., Leverick, F., Lovett, J., Munro, V., Willmott, D.(2023). Myths about Myths? A Commentary on Thomas (2020) and the Question of Jury Rape Myth Acceptance. Journal of Gender-Based Violence, 7(1),189-200.
- Willmott, D., Boduszek, D., Debowska, A., & Hudspith, L. (2021). Jury Decision Making in Rape Trials: An Attitude Problem? In D. Crighton & G. Towl (Eds.), Forensic Psychology (3rd, pp. 94-119). Chichester: Wiley.
- Willmott, D.,Boduszek, D., Debowska, A. & Woodfield, R. (2018). Introduction and Validation of the Juror Decision Scale (JDS): An Empirical Investigation of the Story Model. Journal of Criminal Justice, 57, 26-34.