Professor Katrin Hohl OBE decorated with Freedom of the City award by Lord Mayor

Professor Katrin Hohl OBE was decorated with the Freedom of the City award by the former Lord Mayor of London Michael Mainelli.

The award recognised Professor Hohl’s work during her tenure as the inaugural Lord Mayor’s Fellow, in which she supported the former Lady Mayoress Elisabeth Mainelli in preventing violence against women in the City of London.

Professor Hohl offered strategic guidance on the implementation of the Our Safer City initiative, drawing on her academic expertise and her work on policy, policing and criminal justice in relation to violence against women and girls.

She was the joint academic lead of Operation Soteria Bluestone, a groundbreaking police-academic collaboration which transformed police responses to rape and serious sexual offences. An Independent Advisor to the Government’s Rape Review, Professor Hohl was the only academic invited to provide expert evidence in a recent Public Accounts Committee in Parliament on halving violence against women and girls.

A firm believer in bridging the gap between academia and policymaking, Professor Hohl made one of her commitments during her Lord Mayor’s Fellowship to carry out public engagement activities around this topic.

To this end, she gave multiple talks at roundtables and events in Mansion House hosted by the Lady Mayoress, as well as speaking at the International Women's Forum, and delivering a lecture in the Knowledge Mile series.

The former Lady Mayoress Elisabeth Mainelli, the Patron for the Prevent Violence Against Women and Girls consortium in the City, said:

Katrin has contributed enormously to the development of our various activities by taking part in workshops and sharing her knowledge and insights. We look forward to future collaboration whenever possible.

It has been a real privilege to work with the Lady Mayoress on her initiative to prevent violence against women and girls in the City of London.

The Lord Mayors’ theme for the year was ‘connect to prosper’.

When businesses, practitioners, policing, those with lived experience and academic experts connect and come together that we can improve the safety of women in the City of London and around the globe, allowing them to prosper without the threat or lived reality of male violence.

The idea for last year and future years is that the Fellow intellectually supports the Mayoral theme. Professor Katrin Hohl’s work and research complemented our work in the City on Sustainable Development Goals, particularly SDG5 ‘to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls’.