Contextual Safeguarding Overview with Professor Carlene Firmin

Join Sexual Assault Services Victoria (SASVic) and Victorian Aboriginal Child and Community Agency (VACCA) for an online presentation with Professor Carlene Firmin on Contextual Safeguarding.

Carlene is a Professor of Social Work and Director of the Global Centre for Contextual Safeguarding at Durham University. She is also Co-Editor in Chief of the British Journal of Social Work, co-convener of a special interest group on Social Work and Adolescents for the European Social Work Research Association, a Global Ashoka Fellow, a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and a member of the Churchill Fellowship Advisory Council.

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. She has overseen a research programme to convert this vision into a conceptual and practice framework, in order to reform safeguarding responses and policy frameworks concerned with extra-familial harm, including child sexual exploitation, child criminal exploitation and peer-abuse, in the UK and internationally. She has written in the national newspaper, the Guardian, since 2010, and is widely published in the area of child welfare including through four books and over 50 peer-reviewed papers, book chapters and reports.

We hope you can join us to hear about the work Carlene has done and to learn about her approach in developing contextual safeguarding frameworks.