Dr Stevie-Jade Hardy

Honorary Fellow

Dr Stevie-Jade Hardy is the Head of Change for Policing & Youth Justice at the Youth Endowment Fund – a charity established in 2019 with a £200m endowment and ten year mandate from the Home Office to find out what works in preventing children and young people from becoming involved in violence. Stevie leads on YEF’s work on reforming systems and changing practice within the policing and youth justice sectors. This includes working with policy makers, sector leaders and experts to deliver the recommendations set out in YEF’s System Guidance on Arrested Children. She sits on a range of national advisory groups such as:

• NPCCs’ Knife Crime Working Group
• NPCCs’ Policing Productivity Review
• NPCCs’ Children & Young People’s Group
• YJB’s Youth Justice System Oversight Group 

Stevie also leads on shaping understanding of what works in preventing violence and connecting people with the evidence. This includes commissioning large-scale research projects, partnering with credible and trusted organisations to deliver training, organising national events and producing a range of outputs such as practice guidance.

Before this, Stevie was the Deputy Director and Head of Data, Evidence & Evaluation at Leicester’s Violence Reduction Unit. This was a specialist strategic role responsible for leading the partnership's approach to ensuring that violence reduction programmes and strategies were as effective and efficient as possible. 

From 2012-2020, Stevie worked at the School of Criminology at the University of Leicester. As Associate Professor and Deputy Director of the Centre for Hate Studies, Stevie was involved in a wide-range of major research, evaluation and consultancy projects on hate crime. She played a critical role in influencing meaningful decision-making in relation to public policy at a local, regional and national level through strategy development, expert advisory panels, training, presentations and accessible reports/briefings.

Policy and Research Areas

• Violence prevention
• Public health approaches
• Children and young people
• Policing
• Youth justice

Publications

Archard P.J., Levy A., Hardy S. et al. (2023) ‘Delivering specialist care to children and young people involved with youth justice services during the COVID-19 pandemic’, Mental Health Practice, DOI: 10.7748/mhp.2021.e1571.

Griffiths, C., Archard, P. J., Levy, A., Hardy, S.-J., Bowlay-Williams, J., & Lord, K. (2022). A project providing clinical input to youth justice services informed by principles of trauma-informed practice. Social Work and Social Sciences Review, 23(1), 21-35

Hardy, S. and Chakraborti, N. (2019) Blood, Threats and Fears: The Hidden Worlds of Hate Crime Victims, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hardy, S. (2019) ‘Layers of resistance: Understanding decision-making processes in relation to crime reporting’, International Review of Victimology, Online First.

Chakraborti, N. and Hardy, S. (2017) ‘Beyond Empty Promises: A Reality Check for Hate Crime Scholarship and Policy’ Safer Communities 16 (4): 148-154.

Hardy, S. (2017) Everyday Multiculturalism and Hidden Hate, Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Hardy, S. and Chakraborti, N. (2017) Hate Crime: Identifying and Dismantling Barriers to Justice, Leicester: University of Leicester.