Forensic and Criminal Psychology Research Topics: Courts, Prisons and Young Offenders in Pakistan

Forensic psychology in Pakistan sits where an assessment meets a court order, a prison rule or a police station. Before you commit to a topic, settle these questions:

• Can I realistically enter a jail, a court record room or a hospital ward, or should I work from published judgments and files?
• Which part of my question needs a validated Urdu measure, and which part needs a diagnosis that only a clinician can make?
• Will my ethics committee treat my participants as a protected group, such as children in custody or survivors of violence?
• Has the law behind my topic changed since the studies I plan to build on?
• Do I want to study mental state in court, memory in witnesses, or harm to victims?

Most topics below belong to forensic psychology, meaning psychology applied to courts, custody and victims. Offender profiling and serial offending are left out. This list keeps to questions that a student can ground in Pakistani judgments, records or samples. Each topic is narrow on purpose: it names a law, a decision, an institution or a sample, so a supervisor can judge it in one read.

Mental State and the Courts

On 10 February 2021, the Supreme Court decided Safia Bano v. Home Department, Government of Punjab. The judgment held that a death sentence should not be carried out on a prisoner who cannot understand the reason for the punishment because of mental illness. It also pointed to medical boards, training and forensic mental health facilities. A law and medicine analysis of the judgment summarises these directions clearly. As a result, two research gaps open for psychology students.

1. Mental-state applications at trial: what do sessions courts do with them?

The Supreme Court told trial courts to take a claim of incapacity seriously. It also said medical opinion is essential in the inquiry, and that a Medical Board report should cover psychopathology, intellect, mood, emotions, cognition and insight. However, a forensic psychiatrist writing in the Journal of Pakistan Psychiatric Society argued that the Code of Criminal Procedure provisions on mentally ill accused persons are rarely applied.

Research question: After 2021, how often do sessions courts in one district order a board when the defence raises mental state, and which of the listed areas do the board reports actually address?

Level and approach: MS or MPhil, document analysis of court orders obtained with permission. A common pitfall is counting orders without reading the reasoning, so code the reasons as well as the outcome.

2. Who decides insanity, the medical board or the judge?

The same law and medicine article argues that the judgment placed the decision mainly with medical professionals and gave less weight to the older legal idea of moral capacity. Whether you agree or not, the debate hides a psychology question. Reports differ in how they word capacity, and judges may read the same wording differently.

Research question: In reported judgments that cite Safia Bano, how do courts quote or paraphrase psychiatric and psychological opinion on understanding the nature and wrongfulness of an act?

Level and approach: MPhil or PhD, qualitative content analysis. Keep the thesis psychological, since a purely doctrinal argument belongs in a law thesis topic. Confirm the current legal position before you write your background, since the law on mentally ill prisoners may have changed since these sources were published.

Witnesses, Identification and Custody

Police stations and identification parades produce the evidence that courts later weigh. Psychology offers tested ideas about memory and coercion, but Pakistani studies that apply them are scarce.

3. Estimator variables in eyewitness evidence

In Mian Sohail Ahmed v. State (2019), a full bench of the Supreme Court acquitted two men after reviewing a murder trial. The case report says the court treated identification as a two-step process. First comes the identification parade, then the witness’s credibility is tested against estimator variables such as stress, weapon focus, duration, distance, lighting and memory decay.

Research question: Do Pakistani adults show a weapon-focus effect in an Urdu-instructed video task, and does the effect change identification accuracy a week later?

Level and approach: BS final-year or MS, an experiment with a university sample. Build your own stimuli from local settings instead of borrowing foreign videos, and check your ethics rules for staged violent footage.

4. Suggestiveness in test identification parades

The same judgment criticised a parade that did not match the description in the first report and a joint parade that invited suggestion. Separately, a 2024 legal analysis reviews pre- and post-identification methods in Pakistan, and a study in Law and Policy Review also addresses identification parades.

Research question: Which suggestiveness risks, such as prior sight of the accused or too few fillers, are mentioned in High Court appeals on parades from one province?

Level and approach: MS or MPhil, coding of appeal judgments against a checklist drawn from the eyewitness literature. Test your checklist on ten judgments first, then freeze it.

5. Psychological signs in custodial torture records

A forensic study at the office of the Surgeon Medicolegal Punjab examined 1,820 alleged victims of police torture over five years. It reported mostly physical findings and noted a psychological element in some cases. Meanwhile, the Senate passed the Torture and Custodial Death (Prevention and Punishment) Bill in 2022, and Justice Project Pakistan’s policy brief reports presidential assent on 1 November 2022.

Research question: How often do medico-legal certificates in one Pakistani city record psychological findings, and did that change after the 2022 Act?

Level and approach: MS or PhD, anonymised record review. Do not interview survivors unless a trauma-trained supervisor and a referral route are in place. Check the Ministry of Law and Justice for amendments after 2022.

Young Offenders

Juvenile cases attract many BS and MS projects, but weak ones simply ask whether poverty causes crime. Stronger ones tie a measure to a legal rule or a named institution. For wider child and adolescent theory, see the developmental psychology research topics for Pakistan.

6. Maturity of understanding between ages 10 and 14

According to SPARC’s juvenile justice overview, the Pakistan Penal Code sets the minimum age of criminal responsibility at 10, extended to 14 if the child has an immature understanding of the conduct and its consequences. The same page reports 1,424 juveniles in Pakistan’s jails in December 2019, of whom 1,210 were awaiting trial.

Research question: What evidence do courts and probation staff use to decide maturity of understanding, and could a short structured child interview improve that judgment?

Level and approach: MPhil, interviews with psychologists and probation officers plus a pilot interview protocol. Never test the protocol on children in custody without institutional approval.

7. Depression and anxiety inside juvenile jails

A 2021 study of all 125 juvenile offenders in the central jails of Gujrat, Gujranwala and Sialkot found depression or anxiety disorders in 29%. It used an Urdu SCID-5 interview and warned that results cannot be generalised to other districts.

Research question: What is the prevalence of the same disorders among boys in a Borstal institution in another province, and which sentence or family factors go with it?

Level and approach: MS in clinical psychology, with a clinical supervisor. Permission from the prison authorities comes first, and referral for any boy who screens positive is mandatory. The clinical psychology topics page covers instrument adaptation in more detail.

8. Emotional abuse, emotional maturity and delinquent tendencies

A 2025 path analysis compared 232 boys in the Borstal jails of Faisalabad and Bahawalpur with 276 government school students. Emotional abuse predicted delinquent tendencies, with emotional immaturity, lying and aggression as mediators. Emotional maturity mattered more for juveniles, whereas aggression mattered more for students.

Research question: Does the same mediation pattern hold in a school sample from Sindh or Khyber Pakhtunkhwa once parental acceptance is added?

Level and approach: MS, survey with Urdu scales and multigroup path analysis. Report fit indices honestly, because small samples often fail them.

9. Testing a criminal thinking inventory outside Punjab’s prisons

The Juvenile Criminal Thinking Styles Inventory has 19 items and three factors: domination, social alienation and vindication. It came from 211 incarcerated boys in Punjab prisons, with reliability from .71 to .81. The authors suggest studying girls and other kinds of detention centre.

Research question: Does the three-factor structure hold in a confirmatory analysis with girls or with boys in a child protection facility?

Level and approach: MS or MPhil. Ask the authors for permission to use the inventory. Write the plan up using the methodology chapter guide as a checklist.

Prisons and Screening

Prison research needs permission from provincial prison authorities, and that approval takes time. Plan for it in your timeline.

10. Women prisoners: current mental health against old figures

Published prevalence figures for women inmates come from data collected years ago. A study at Adiala jail, Rawalpindi found psychiatric illness in 62.5% of 128 women in 2006 and 2007. A Peshawar study looked at depression among 64 women in 2008. Another study linked childhood abuse to pessimism among 400 women across four central prisons of Punjab.

Research question: Is psychiatric morbidity among women in one district jail different today from the Adiala figures, and does it differ for women living with their children inside?

Level and approach: MS or MPhil, a two-stage screen and interview design like the Adiala study, with a psychiatrist on the team. Do not ask about abuse history without a referral plan.

11. Does the toolkit’s screening questionnaire agree with a clinician?

Justice Project Pakistan’s prison mental health toolkit includes a Forensic Mental Health Screening Questionnaire in detainee, prisoner and pre-execution versions. It reports that 598 prisoners were diagnosed and treated in 2020 while 3,831 were on death row, and that it is unclear how many of the latter are mentally ill.

Research question: How closely do screening results from the prisoner version match a psychiatrist’s structured interview in one district jail?

Level and approach: MS or PhD, a criterion validity study. A screen is not a diagnosis, so report sensitivity and false positives rather than prevalence. This is also the topic that most needs senior clinical supervision.

Survivors of Violence

The last topic carries the highest ethical load on this list. Choose it only if you already have an organisation willing to open its doors.

12. Acid attack survivors: long-term adjustment and under-reporting

A 2025 qualitative study interviewed 12 women survivors, aged 25 to 40, between five and ten years after an attack, through Acid Survivors Foundation Pakistan. Its themes included psychological distress, social rejection and reasons for dropping cases, such as family honour, bribery and fear of retaliation. All participants were rural and uneducated, which the authors list as a limit. The Foundation’s counts, cited in an earlier Pakistani study, fell from 91 cases in 2011 to 42 in 2016.

Research question: How do urban, educated survivors describe adjustment and the decision to continue or withdraw a case?

Level and approach: MS or PhD, interpretative phenomenological analysis. Recruit only through an organisation, and arrange for a psychologist to be available during interviews, as the 2025 study did.

Matching a Topic to Your Degree

Level	Topics that fit	Typical design
BS final year	3, 4 (judgment coding only)	Small experiment or coding of reported judgments
MS	1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12	Survey, record review or interview study with a supervisor
MPhil	2, 4, 6, 9	Content analysis, interviews or scoping review
PhD	2, 5, 11, 12	Validation study or mixed methods

Browse the main psychology research topics if none of these fits your department’s focus. The wider thesis topics directory lists other subjects.

Ethics and Access Before You Write the Proposal

Ethics decides whether a forensic topic survives. Most universities require an ethical review before data collection, and prisons add their own permission on top.

• Seek permission from prison or court authorities in writing before you promise a sample size.
• Treat children in custody, survivors of violence and people with mental illness as protected groups, with guardian consent or capacity checks where relevant.
• Plan referral and distress steps for every interview, and do not collect data that you cannot protect.
• Store court and medical records without names, and describe the anonymising steps in the proposal.

The HEC research repository is useful because you can see how earlier theses described access and approval.

Narrowing One of These Topics in Five Steps

1. Pick one institution, such as a district jail, a sessions court or a Borstal institution.
2. Name one law, judgment or document that frames the question.
3. Choose one measure or coding frame that already exists, and check its Urdu version and licence.
4. Decide the data route first: records, interviews or a screen. Then test whether you can get it.
5. Write the research question in one sentence, and ask your supervisor whether a single semester can answer it.

For the design step, choosing a research methodology explains how to match method to question. Then writing the research proposal turns the choice into a submission.

Common Mistakes with Forensic Topics

• Choosing a topic first and hoping a prison will give access later.
• Reporting screening scores as diagnoses.
• Using foreign eyewitness or interrogation findings without testing them on a local sample.
• Writing a legal argument when the degree needs a psychological question.
• Skipping the dated check on a law, such as the 2022 torture Act or the post-2021 position on mental illness.

Doctoral students can also read the MPhil thesis guide for how committees judge scope at that level.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is forensic psychology the same as criminal psychology?

Not exactly. Forensic psychology applies psychology to legal questions such as fitness to stand trial, witness memory and risk. Criminal psychology usually studies why people offend. In Pakistan, student theses mix both, so state in your title which one you mean.

Can a BS student use these topics?

Yes, but only the document-based or experimental ones. Topics 3 and 4 need no prison access. Topics that involve detainees, survivors or patients need supervision and written permission, which a BS timeline rarely allows.

Where do I find Pakistani court judgments for these topics?

Start with Supreme Court and High Court judgments quoted in law journals and case reports, then ask your department about subscription databases. Always cite the report you actually read, and keep a note of the date you accessed it.

Support is available 24/7, every day of the year, on WhatsApp, email and live chat if you want a second reader for a forensic proposal through research proposal support, and you can read what other students say on the reviews page. Doctoral candidates can look at PhD thesis help as the next step.