Professor Loraine Gelsthorpe

Loraine Gelsthorpe is Professor of Criminology & Criminal Justice and Director of  the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge. She a Fellow and Tutor for Graduate Affairs at Pembroke College.    With strong research interests in human trafficking and in the criminalisation of migrants she was co-founder (with Professor Madeleine Arnot) of a University wide multi-disciplinary Cambridge Migration Research Network (CAMMIGRES) in 2013, and became Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Human Movement when it was created in 2018. She  sits on various University Committees including the General Board Education Committee and the Board of Graduate Studies. Loraine has wide interests in the links between criminal justice and social justice, looking at race, gender and social exclusion, women and sentencing, and at the effectiveness of youth and community penalties in particular. She also has a strong interest in research methodologies and research ethics.

Loraine has lived in Cambridge since the early 1980s when she came to do an MPhil in Criminology, though the call of a PhD was stronger than a return to a social work career. After the PhD she had a number of post-doc appointments at the University of Lancaster, UCNW (Bangor), and at the LSE, which involved work with the Metropolitan Police and London boroughs on diversion from prosecution, men's prisons in the midlands, and race and gender issues in pre-sentence reports respectively. She began working for the University of Cambridge in 1991. Professor Gelsthorpe sits on various government Advisory Committees, and is deputy chair of the 2021 REF exercise (Social Policy sub-panel).  She was President of the British Society of Criminology between 2011-2014. She currently co-chairs the European Society of Criminology Gender, Crime and Criminal Justice Working Group.

Professor Gelsthorpe is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She was an 11+ failure  and pursued O levels and A levels at what was then called Newark Technical College.  Loraine increasingly sees a need to speak out about this experience - to encourage others whose own routes in higher education may not be traditional. Loraine is a UKCP registered and accredited psychoanalytical psychotherapist in her 'spare time', and a trustee of Pembroke House, a community centre in Walworth, South London.