After my undergraduate degree, I trained as a secondary English teacher and then as an adult literacy teacher. I worked for five years as a policy adviser for HEFCE before returning to study on an Economic and Social Research Council 1+3 studentship.  I completed my PhD in summer 2014 and took on a number of teaching and research contracts, including:

• evaluating a trafficking and grooming project (Mulvihill and Williamson, 2014)
• co-authoring a 2015 report for Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary on ‘honour’ abuse and FGM (see also Mulvihill et al., 2019; Gangoli, Gill, Mulvihill and Hester, 2018)
• working on the Justice, Gender Based Violence and Inequalities project (2015-2018)

I secured my first lectureship here at Bristol in summer 2017 and the new BSc Criminology degree was launched that autumn.

I have worked on domestic, sexual and ‘honour’ abuse and written particularly on the sex industry and related policy.  In 2019 I was co-author of a Home Office study looking at the nature and prevalence of sex work and prostitution in England and Wales.  My research is both theoretical (see for example, Mulvihill, 2019; Mulvihill and Large, 2019; Mulvihill and Hester, 2021) and practice-oriented (see for example, Matolcsi, Mulvihill, Lilley-Walker and Hester, 2020; Mulvihill and Thorlby, 2020; Sanders, Vajzovic, Brooks-Gordon and Mulvihill, 2020) and I engage regularly with police, NGOs and policy-makers.

Through 2021 and into 2022, I have been working on an Oak Foundation funded project looking at faith and coercive control, which builds on earlier work on this theme (see Abrahams, Aghtaie and Mulvihill, 2019;  Aghtaie, Mulvihill, Abrahams and Hester, 2020)  I am currently working on a second publication looking at sexual harm and inequalities in popular music (see Mulvihill, 2021 and Mulvihill, forthcoming).

In my current teaching, I lead a first year mandatory Criminology unit called 'Representations of Crime and Harm', which explores the intersections of crime with visual, popular and media culture, and the implications for crime control.  I also lead a final year unit called' Sex Power and Consumption', which looks at the sex industry in the UK and globally.

I am an editor of the Journal of Gender Based Violence.

In 2022, I had research leave and have initiated two new areas of work on sexual harm.  First, I am in data collection and analysis phase for work on non-consensual 'rough sex'.  Second, I am progressing a funding bid looking at 'professional' perpetrators of sexual violence and abuse, specifically against adults.  See this paper on doctor abuse, as an example.  I plan also to continue writing on the intersections of sex, harm and popular culture.