Carlene is a Professor of Social Work and Director of the Global Centre for Contextual Safeguarding at Durham University. Carlene 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, a member of the Churchill Fellowship Advisory Council, and an Associate of Strathclyde University’s Children and Young People’s Centre for Justice.

Carlene has researched young people’s experiences of community and group-based violence since 2008 and advocate for comprehensive approaches that keep them safe in public places, schools, and peer groups. I coined the term Contextual Safeguarding in 2015 to describe a vision for improving safeguarding responses to young people at risk of harm beyond their family homes, and since then 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. 

Carlene is widely published in the area of child welfare including through four books and over 50 peer-reviewed papers, book chapters and reports. Carlene's book Contextual Safeguarding and Child Protection: Rewriting the Rules won the Routledge Prize for a Sociology Monograph in 2020.