Carlene Firmin

Professor Carlene Firmin MBE is a Professor of Social Work and Director of the Global Centre for Contextual Safeguarding at Durham University. She serves as Co‑Editor in Chief of the British Journal of Social Work and co‑convenes the European Social Work Research Association’s special interest group on Social Work and Adolescents. She is also a Global Ashoka Fellow, a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, a member of the Churchill Fellowship Advisory Council, and an Associate of Strathclyde University’s Children and Young People’s Centre for Justice. Since 2008, Professor Firmin has researched young people’s experiences of community and group-based violence, championing comprehensive approaches to keeping them safe in public spaces, schools, and peer groups. In 2015, she coined the term Contextual Safeguarding to articulate a vision for strengthening safeguarding responses to harm occurring beyond the family home. She has since led a substantial research programme transforming this vision into a conceptual and practice framework that is reshaping safeguarding policy and practice related to extra‑familial harm – including child sexual exploitation, child criminal exploitation, and peer abuse – in the UK and internationally. Professor Firmin is widely published in the field of child welfare, with four books and more than 50 peer‑reviewed papers, book chapters, and research reports. Her book Contextual Safeguarding and Child Protection: Rewriting the Rules received the Routledge Prize for a Sociology Monograph in 2020.