Professor Corinne May-Chahal (Sociology, Lancaster University) is theme lead for Violence and Society in the inter-disciplinary research centre Security Lancaster. She has over 30 years’ experience in child welfare as an academic, researcher and practitioner, with a commitment to improving UK and European policy and practice including as; Special Advisor to the WHO Violence Prevention Initiative and co-author of the chapter on Child Abuse and Neglect in the World Report on Violence; expert advisor to the EU Economic and Social Committee on sexual abuse, sexual exploitation of children and child pornography;Co-Chair of the English College of Social Work; a founding member of the Family Justice Council and a member of the Munro Review of Child Protection. Her recent research focuses on safeguarding in a digital world and developing child centred practices that enjoin those who have child protection responsibilities to engage with childhood as neither online nor offline but both. This research has included interdisciplinary studies with software engineers of deception and the identification of new child abuse images online, reviews of technology and trafficking of women and girls for the EU and a Rapid Evidence Appraisal on victims of online-facilitated child sexual abuse for the UK Independent Inquiry on Child Sexual Abuse. For the last 3 years she also chaired the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) Child Abuse and Neglect Clinical Guideline Development Group, which searched over 55,000 research studies from across the world to make recommendations for identification, assessment and interventions for children and families experiencing abuse and neglect.

Ulrike Urban-Stahl is a professor of Social Work at Freie Universität Berlin. From 2006 to 2011 Ulrike Urban-Stahl was employed as a professor of Social Work at Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences in Berlin. She is a founder of the Berlin legal aid fond for youth welfare („Berliner Rechtshilfefonds Jugendhilfe e.V.“) and the German network for ombudpersons in the youth welfare. Furthermore, she is a board member at the German working commitee for youth welfare (AGJ). From 2010 until 2013 she was a member of the coordination group of the National Coalition for the implementation of the UN- children´s right convention in Germany.

In Germany, Ulrike Urban-Stahl is a recognized expert for the youth welfare system in connection with legal questions. The focus of her research are professional practices, child protection and the rights of young people and their families in the youth welfare system. Her latest research projects are on complaints procedures in youth welfare institutions and home visits in child protection work.

Dr. Gill Main is an Associate Professor in the School of Education at the University of Leeds, UK.  Her research is concerned with child poverty and social exclusion and the links between child poverty and child well-being; in particular, her focus is on incorporating children’s and families’ perspectives into how child poverty is conceptualised and measured.  She has been involved in multiple national and international projects, including Missing Out, part of The Children’s Society well-being research programme; the 2012 UK Poverty and Social Exclusion Survey; Children’s Worlds (the International Study of Children’s Well-being). From 2016-2018 she was PI on a UK Economic and Social Research Council project, ‘Fair Shares and Families’, which examined the links between child poverty and subjective well-being with a focus on how children and families understand the processes and outcomes of resource sharing within families.  Gill is co-editor of the Journal of Poverty and Social Justice, and has published on child poverty, child well-being, and children’s policy.

Dr. Veronika Magyar-Haas is researcher and senior lecturer at the Chair of Social Pedagogy at the Institute of Education of the University of Zurich in Switzerland since 2015. From 2008 to 2015 she worked as a research assistant and lecturer at the Chairs of General Education and Social Pedagogy at the same institution. She held a scholarship from the German Research Foundation (DFG) in the research training group «Youth Welfare in Transition» at the Bielefeld University from 2005 to 2008. Her research has been situated in the areas of philosophy of education and social work. This includes social-scientific research on body, emotions and vulnerability; qualitative-empirical research on education and social inequality; anthropological concepts in educational science as well as methods of qualitative social research, especially video-analyses. In her video-ethnographical study in a youth centre for girls she discussed the conditions of the (im-)possibility to preserve the integrity and dignity of the youths and of the social workers in pedagogically arranged contexts. For this analysis she worked with theories of professionalism and of educations, with philosophical-anthropological theories, and with theories of shame and blaming. For two years she is researcher in the context of the multinational qualitative study «Children’s Understandings of Well-being». http://www.cuwb.org/

Dr. Dirk Schubotz has studied Social Sciences and Education in Berlin, Belfast and Kassel and he is now senior lecturer in Social Policy at Queen’s University Belfast and a member of ARK (www.ark.ac.uk). The main areas of his research include attitudes and experiences of children and young people, sexual and gender identity, children’s and young people’s rights, sexual and mental health and wellbeing, and sexual exploitation. Since 2003, he has directed Young Life and Times (YLT), an annual cross-sectional study of 16-year olds in Northern Ireland (www.ark.ac.uk/ylt). YLT covers many aspect of the lives of 16-year olds in Northern Ireland, a society emerging from violent conflict. Dirk is also involved in the management of Kids’ Life and Times (KLT), an annual online survey of 10 and 11-year olds in Northern Ireland. Dirk is also interested in narrative methods and participatory and collaborative approaches to researching people’s lives. He has undertaken a range of studies that involved children and young people as advisors and/or as co-researchers. Dirk is a member of the Centre for Children’s Rights at Queen’s University Belfast.