We’re delighted to welcome Dr Carlene Firmin, MBE, to our Department of Sociology. Carlene is a leading expert in the safeguarding of young people at risk of abuse.

In this ground-breaking talk Dr Firmin, the founder of Contextual Safeguarding, outlines three things. One: how contexts beyond families are associated with abuse. Two: how traditional child protection systems fail to engage with these contextual dynamics. Three: the components of the Contextual Safeguarding system that would redefine what child protection means.

She’ll be one of the UK’s youngest ever female black professors when she joins us from the University of Bedfordshire in September.

Carlene has pioneered the Contextual Safeguarding approach to child protection.

This helps experts understand and respond to young people’s experiences of harm outside of families, including in peer groups, schools and local neighbourhoods.

Carlene’s appointment will see Sociology become a hub for research into Contextual Safeguarding.

She will continue working with colleagues and partners at the University of Bedfordshire’s Safer Young Lives Research Centre and the Contextual Safeguarding Research Programme to explore the practice’s influence on child protection policies internationally.

Her work has already helped advance policy and research into the protection of adolescents in the UK, Europe and Australia.

It has also led to changes in social care responses to abuse that takes place outside of families in England, Wales and Scotland.

In 2008 Carlene received a London Peace Award for bridging the gap between policymakers and young people in responding to street-based violence.

In 2011 she was the youngest black woman to receive an MBE for raising the profile of women and girls impacted by serious youth violence in the UK.

And in 2020 she brought together the Contextual Safeguarding Academics Network to advance how harm beyond families is understood and responded to around the world.