معرفی
Professor Judith Harwin is a Professor in Socio-Legal Studies at Lancaster University's Law School, where she has held a 60% contract since 2016. She co-directs the interdisciplinary Centre for Child and Family Justice Research with Professor Karen Broadhurst from the Sociology Department. Her work bridges law, social policy, and child welfare with a focus on vulnerable children and families within the justice system.
Harwin's research focuses on vulnerable children, child and parental outcomes where critical decisions need to be made regarding child safety, wellbeing and risks of permanent removal from their birth parents. Her work primarily involves the use of large-scale administrative datasets to monitor trends over time in use of different legal family type orders, supported by case studies of local practice and informed by in-depth explorations of personal experience of the child care social and legal system. She prioritizes promoting access to justice, identifying system and culture blocks, and informing policy and practice, drawing on problem-solving justice and underpinning sociolegal theories such as therapeutic jurisprudence. Much of her research has centered on parental substance misuse and its consequences.
Her publication record demonstrates a strong focus on Family Drug and Alcohol Courts (FDAC), special guardianship orders, supervision orders, and the intersection of substance misuse, domestic abuse, and child protection. The trend in her work shows increasing use of large-scale data linkage approaches to evaluate interventions in family justice, with recent projects connecting national datasets across police records, family justice data, and FDAC records. Her research consistently applies socio-legal frameworks to practical child welfare issues, with a particular emphasis on vulnerable populations and alternative care arrangements that keep children within family networks.
Harwin has served on numerous advisory groups including the Public Law Working Group on special guardianship, the Adoption & Special Guardianship Leadership Board, the Family Drug and Alcohol Courts National Advisory Board, and the Cafcass Research Advisory Committee. Her research on FDAC and large-scale datasets provided two of the four case studies for the Law School's 2021 REF submission, where the Law School ranked number 6 nationally.
She supervises postgraduate research students, including Lily Golding, and has received funding from major organizations including the Nuffield Foundation, ESRC, DfE, EU, and UNICEF. Current research projects include a major ESRC-funded investigation of the impact of Family Drug and Alcohol Courts on parental offending, the FDAC data rescue project, and research on reunification and special guardianship.
Harwin has established herself as a leading researcher in problem-solving approaches within family justice, with particular expertise in the use of administrative data to evaluate interventions for vulnerable children and families. Her work has directly influenced policy and practice through multiple government advisory roles and high-impact research projects.
