Ruth Beecher is an historian of medicine, childhood and parenting, and the welfare state in modern Britain and the United States.

Between 2018 and 2024 she investigated the role of health professionals in relation to early intervention in child sexual abuse in Britain, 1970-2000, using archival research and new oral histories. She was Director of the interdisciplinary Sexual Harms and Medical Encounters Research Project, which investigated the role of medicine and psychiatry in sexual violence. Her book, Community Health Practitioners and Child Sexual Abuse in the Family, 1970s-2010s, will be published by Palgrave Macmillan this year.

Her current Wellcome-funded project, ‘Child sexual abuse and recovery: historicising survivor and practitioner experiences (c1950-2022)’ runs from 2024-28 and will produce the first social, cultural and medical history into recovery from CSA in the second half of twentieth century Britain and Ireland. Beecher is also the Co-Chair of the Challenging Research Network  an international online community of friendly researchers and academics who work in complex, emotionally demanding, and politically charged research territories.

Prior to retraining as a historian in the 2010s, she worked as a senior manager in children and family services in the public sector.

Trauma, Mental Health & Recovery