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Professor of Social Work, University of Durham
Professor Fermin is an applied social researcher concerned with safeguarding young people, social justice, and inequality. She has particular expertise in social care responses to abuse between young people and harm in extra-familial spaces and places. In 2015, she founded the concept of Contextual Safeguarding to enhance practice and policy in this area.
She joined the Department of Sociology at Durham University in 2021. Prior to this, she developed the Contextual Safeguarding research programme at the University of Bedfordshire for eight years. Before entering academia, she spent over ten years working in voluntary and statutory agencies, researching young people’s experiences of community and group-based violence and advocating for comprehensive social care and wider safeguarding approaches to keep young people safe in public places, schools, and peer groups.
As her publications demonstrate, Professor Fermin has designed and used Contextual Safeguarding as both a theoretical and operational framework to draw attention to, and address, the social and cultural contexts in which extra-familial abuse occurs. Working with experts in child protection law, public health, criminology, psychology, and education, she has used research to drive systemic change in how safeguarding systems respond when young people come to harm.
Professor Fermin is committed to applied, accessible, and usable research. Over the course of her career, she has used research to inform the development of safeguarding and child protection policies, including statutory guidance and funding programmes. Moreover, she has worked with research colleagues, practitioners, and young people to co-create knowledge, recommendations, and toolkits that enable the application of Contextual Safeguarding in practice. She is also dedicated to creating safe and accessible work environments for racially minoritised professionals involved in safeguarding and violence prevention, as well as in academia, and contributes to a range of initiatives aimed at building equitable services and systems.
She is the co-convener of the 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; Associate Editor of Child Abuse Review; a member of the Ofsted Insights and Evidence (Social Care) External Reference Group; and a member of the Churchill Fellowship Advisory Council. She has written for The Guardian since 2010 and is widely published in the field of child welfare, including four books and over fifty peer-reviewed papers, book chapters, and reports. In 2011, Professor Fermin became the youngest Black woman to receive an MBE for her seminal work on gang-affected young women in the UK.
