About
Dr. April Gould is an expert on radicalization, extremism, ideological- and hate-motivated violence, and collective violence. This expertise derives from both her academic research and her personal experience interviewing and analyzing hard-to-reach and violent criminal populations. She is qualified to testify as an expert in cases in which individuals have been radicalized online or through group involvement and have acted on behalf of personal or collective grievances. She would effectively investigate, locate, and interview people who prefer to remain off the grid.
Dr. Gould’s experience includes forensic interviewing, qualitative and quantitative research, and academic publishing involving over 9,500 cases involved in criminal and civil litigation. Dr. Gould has interviewed current and former terrorists, AB109 parolees, members of law enforcement, gang members, and victims of child abuse, sexual assault, and domestic violence. She has taught courses on violence risk assessment, threat assessment, radicalization, workplace violence prevention, mental illness, suicide prevention, and deviance to intelligence, security, and human resources professionals and to university students.
Dr. Gould is perhaps best known for her work interviewing former white supremacist terrorists about their grievances and desistance from violent extremism. Her dissertation research—which included 280 women who had killed 975 victims (and attempted to kill over 3,700 others)—redefined the concept of grievances in radicalization and terrorism, invalidating former theories and highlighting inconsistencies and misconceptions commonly held by the public and academics alike. Her analyses demonstrated how grievances, education, and employment influence women’s duration of involvement in terrorism and their lethality in violent extremism. Her research has been published in the German Handbook of Terrorism, the Journal of Threat Assessment and Management, the Journal of Qualitative Criminal Justice and Criminology, and Behavioral Sciences and the Law, among others.