Affiliated Consultant Profile

Email: Carlene.e.Firmin@durham.ac.uk 

Area of expertise provided as part of the CIS Affiliated Consultant Network:

• Student well-being: protection, safety and security

Dr Carlene Firmin is Professor of Social Work at Durham University. Carlene has researched young people’s experiences of community and group-based violence since 2008 and has advocated for comprehensive approaches that keep them safe in public places, schools, and peer groups. Carlene coined the term Contextual Safeguarding in 2014 to describe a vision for improving safeguarding responses to young people at risk of harm beyond their family homes. In 2016 she published the Contextual Safeguarding framework: a framework that has since been used to reform safeguarding responses and policy frameworks concerned with extra-familial harm in the UK and internationally. Carlene is co-convener of a special interest group on Social Work and Adolescents for the European Social Work Research Association; she is a Global Ashoka Fellow, and also a member of the Churchill Fellowship Advisory Council. She has written in the national newspaper, the Guardian, since 2010, and is widely published in the area of child welfare including through two sole-authored books. In 2011 Carlene became the youngest black woman to receive an MBE for her seminal work on gang-affected young women in the UK.

Recent Publications

• Firmin, C and Hancock, D. (2018) Profiling CSE: Building a Contextual Picture of a Local Problem. In: H. Beckett & J. Pearce, eds. Understanding and Responding to Child Sexual Exploitation. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 107-120
• Firmin, C and Abbott M. (2018) A Route to Safety: Using bus boarding data to identify roles for transport providers within contextual safeguarding systems. Children and Society
• Firmin, C (2017) Abuse between Young People: A Contextual Account Abingdon: Routledge
• Firmin, C. (2017) From genograms to peer-group mapping: introducing peer relationships into social work assessment and intervention. Families Relationships and Societies DOI: 10.1332/204674317X15088482907590