Carlene Firmin MBE (born 1983 or 1984) is a British social researcher and writer specialising in violence between young people, and founder of the MsUnderstood Partnership. She is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bedfordshire.
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Early life and education
Firmin attended St Michael's Catholic Grammar School in Barnet, London. She has a B.A. in Philosophy from Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge, and an M.Sc. in Social policy and planning from the London School of Economics. She has a Professional Doctorate from the University of Bedfordshire for which her thesis was "Peer on peer abuse: safeguarding implications of contextualising abuse between young people within social fields" (2015).
Career
Firmin was Senior Policy Officer at Race on the Agenda (ROTA), and founded the GAG project (Girls Against Gangs, or Girls Affected by Gangs, or Gendered Action on Gangs). She has held positions of assistant director of policy and research at Barnardos, specialising in youth justice and sexual exploitation of children; principal policy adviser at the Office of the Children's Commissioner; and head of the secretariat for the Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Groups and Gangs.
Between 2011 and 2014 she wrote a regular column "Girl in the Corner" in The Guardian.
In 2013 she founded the MsUnderstood Partnership, a joint project between Girls in Gangs, Imkaan and the University of Bedfordshire. The project "aims to improve local and national responses to young people’s experiences of inequality".
Firmin is a Senior Research Fellow in the Institute of Applied Research of the Department of Applied Social Studies at the University of Bedfordshire.
Awards
Firmin was awarded an MBE in the 2011 New Year Honours for "services to girls' and women's issues", and was the youngest black woman to have received this honour.