Jessica Taylor (author)

Taylor grew up in a council estate in Stoke-on-Trent.[3] She was repeatedly sexually and physically abused as a teenager by men in her town, which she kept hidden from her family. As the result of her repeated rapes, Taylor gave birth to her first child at the age of 17 and reported her abuse to the police.[3]

Taylor began volunteering with domestic violence victims before deciding to earn her Bachelor of Science Hons degree in psychology from the Open University.[4] Upon receiving her degree, Taylor co-founded The Eaton Foundation, the first Male Mental Health and Wellbeing Centre in the UK, with Alex Eaton.[5] She eventually quit her job and founded VictimFocus, an organization that would address victim blaming practices in social care, policing, mental health and support services.[6] For her efforts, she was shortlisted for the 2017 and 2018 Emma Humphreys Memorial Prize.[7][8] Since starting in 2018, her VictimFocus blog has had an annual readership of over 1.3 million.[9]

In 2019, Taylor completed her PhD in forensic psychology from the University of Birmingham with a thesis titled ‘Logically, I know I’m not to blame but I still feel to blame’: exploring and measuring victim blaming and self-blame of women who have been subjected to sexual violence.[10] While working towards her doctoral degree, Taylor was appointed to Chair of the Parliamentary Conference on Violence Against Women and Girls.[11] Upon finishing her doctoral research, Taylor became a Senior Lecturer in Criminal and Forensic Psychology.[12] She was later recognized for her "contribution to the psychology of victim blaming of women, her work in mental health and her contribution to feminism" by the Royal Society of Arts.[13] In 2020, Taylor re-published her thesis as a book titled Why Women are Blamed for Everything, for which she received large amounts of online hate. The abuse took place over Facebook and Twitter and Taylor eventually notified the police after her personal computer was hacked.[14][15] In spite of this, Why Women are Blamed for Everything sold 10,000 copies in its first two months before being bought by Constable, part of Hachette.[16][17]

Dr Taylor self-published the title in April 2020 and it went on sell over 10,000 copies in the first eight weeks, according to the publisher, securing high-profile endorsements from the likes of Caitlin Moran, Jonathan Ross, Sue Perkins and Samira Ahmed.[18]

Based on three years of doctoral research and 10 years of practice with women and girls, Why Women are Blamed for Everything explores the reasons why society and individual psychology blames women for male violence committed against them.[19] It draws on the psychometric measure Dr Taylor developed during her PhD research–called the BOWSVA scale–which measures the way the general public and professionals apportion blame to women and girls who have been subjected to sexual violence, and includes many interviews with women who have been blamed for sexual assaults and professionals working in sexual violence services who are attempting to deconstruct victim blaming.[20]

In June 2021, the same publisher announced that it had acquired her next title Sexy But Psycho: Uncovering the Labelling of Women and Girls. Publisher Andreas Campomar bought UK and Commonwealth rights from Rory Scarfe at the Blair Partnership. It is billed as “a challenging and uncomfortable book which seeks to explore the way professionals and society at large label and sexualise women and girls”.[21]

• The Little Orange Book: Learning about abuse from the voice of the child (2018)[22]
• Detoxing Taylor (2011)[23]
• Why Women are Blamed for Everything: Exploring Victim Blaming of Women Subjected to Abuse and Trauma (2020)[24]
• 'I thought it was just a part of life' Understanding the Scale of Violence Committed Against Women in the UK Since Birth (2021)[25]
• Sexy But Psycho: Uncovering the Labelling of Women and Girls (2022)[26]

• Jessica Taylor publications indexed by Google Scholar