Kate Cavanagh

For those of a similar name, see Kate Kavanagh (disambiguation)

Catherine (Kate) Cavanagh (4 December 1951 – 15 November 2008) was a social worker, social science researcher and activist. She worked in the fields of domestic violence, child abuse and rape, with the aim of understanding extreme forms of violence in order to develop prevention strategies.

Biography Cavanagh was born in the Gorbals area of Glasgow to Adeline Martin MacGill, a seamstress, and John Cavanagh, a spirit salesman. She attended Holyrood Secondary School in Glasgow and later studied business at Glasgow College of Commerce and Distribution.

She studied at the University of Stirling graduating with a BA in sociology (1975) and an MSc (1978). While employed as a social worker in England, Cavanagh was graduated with a second master's degree in social work, from the University of Warwick. In 1998 she received a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Manchester in 1998.

Career In the 1970s Cavanagh worked as a research assistant, alongside fellow student Monica Wilson, with Rebecca and Russell Dobash on the first study in Britain of violence against women. They examined 12,000 police records and interviewed over 100 women in an attempt to understand the plight of abused women and their children, and responses of the justice system. She used the findings for her MSc thesis, Battered women and social control (1978).

Cavanagh began working as a social worker at Leicestershire County Council in 1978 and continued to work in the field of social work throughout the first half of the 1980s. She was appointed guardian ad litem (in litigation) for Derbyshire, where she helped establish a voluntary hostel for women with housing needs, and became the authority's first research social worker. Beyond her formal roles in academia, Cavanagh worked to raise public awareness, change public policies and practices, and introduce innovations for abused women and their children, and for victims of rape.