About Us

Gavin leads Every Casualty Counts as Executive Director. He is responsible for developing strategy, cultivating our talented team and engaging externally.

Gavin has over 20 years’ experience in senior positions leading teams in humanitarian INGOs and the UK government. He has worked with the highest levels of government and in the international system, including as the UK government’s international climate finance negotiator at the EU and UN.

Gavin has worked on a wide range of issues including refugee response, preventing sexual violence in conflict and the children in armed conflict agenda. He has also led successful public campaigns to end violence against children in emergencies.

Gavin joined Every Casualty Counts from Concern UK, where he was Director of Policy and Campaigns. He tweets @gavincrowden.

Rachel has worked as a researcher and advocate in the human rights sector for almost twenty years. Before joining Every Casualty Counts she was the Director of Programmes at Child Soldiers International, where she led the launch of a global database on child military exploitation. Previously Rachel was a Europe and Central Asia Researcher at Amnesty International, with responsibility for Spain, Portugal and the French-speaking countries of Western Europe. She has worked on issues ranging from asylum to torture, counter-terrorism, women’s prisons, and child soldiers. In 2018 she co-authored ‘Why 18 Matters’, which challenges the legality of the military recruitment of minors in countries including the UK and USA.

Rachel’s work has frequently focused on engaging with UN member states, human rights bodies and humanitarian agencies to seek change in international law. She has also worked directly with government ministers, security agencies and the judiciary to improve national practice in various states.

Federica holds an MSc in Violence, Conflict and Development at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Before joining Every Casualty Counts, she had been working in the humanitarian and development sector for over 15 years, of which over a decade was spent working with the International Committee of the Red Cross in the field and at HQ. She has been working in several contexts around the world, such as Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Peru, Afghanistan, Armenia, Central African Republic, Cameroon, Kosovo, Italy, France, Brussels, Geneva, Jerusalem and Gaza. Over the years, she has focused her work on programmes supporting missing people or the dead and their families, joining forces with all relevant stakeholders including governments and other decision-makers, to encourage them to uphold their obligations under International Human Rights Law and International Humanitarian Law.

Mike Spagat is a Professor of Economics at Royal Holloway University of London. He earned his Ph.D. at Harvard University and earlier held faculty posts at Brown University and the University of Illinois. Professor Spagat’s papers on armed conflict have been published in Nature, Scientific Reports, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of Peace Research, the Journal of Conflict Resolution and PLoS Medicine among other places. His current research addresses universal patterns in modern war, fabrication in survey research, the possible decline of war, the impact of drone strikes, civilian casualties in the Iraq conflict and problems in the measurement of war deaths. Professor Spagat is also on the Board of Action on Armed Violence, blog at War, Numbers and Human Losses, tweets and periodically offers two free online courses with FutureLearn – “Accounting for Death in War” and “Survival Statistics“.

Kat Brealey is a Programmes and Partnerships Manager for the UK charity Embrace the Middle East, responsible for projects relating to healthcare, education and community development in Egypt and Iraq. She holds an MA in Reconciliation and Peacebuilding from the University of Winchester and has spent time listening and learning in a range of conflict-affected contexts, from Israel Palestine to Myanmar to Guatemala. She has a particular interest in how communities remember and heal from violence – something casualty recording can play an important role in. As well as being on the board of ECC, she is a trustee of Cord, an NGO promoting peace and strengthening civil society in Southeast Asia.

Iain Overton is the executive director at the London-based nonprofit Action on Armed Violence. He has been witness to the devastating impact of armed violence on numerous occasions and has reported on conflict or extremes of violence in Ukraine, Syria/Jordan, Pakistan, Philippines, Kosovo, Nagorno Karabakh, Colombia, El Salvador, Honduras, Iraq, Solomon Islands, Mexico, the West Bank, Somalia and Liberia. Iain’s human rights reporting has been awarded a Peabody Award, two Amnesty Awards and a BAFTA Scotland, among others. Iain is the author of ‘Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of Firearms’ (2015) and ‘The Price of Paradise: How the Suicide Bomber Shaped the Modern Age’ (2019). He holds an MPhil and BA from Cambridge University.