Summary of key findings
This is the first known population-based study of contact by NT Aboriginal children with both the child protection and youth justice systems. The results reinforce findings from other studies that child maltreatment is a major risk factor for youth justice system contact. The results also address a gap in research by demonstrating no substantial difference in the risk of first offence for children with unsubstantiated notifications compared to children with substantiated notifications. Instead, any record of CPS contact in both early and middle childhood was found to be strongly associated with a higher risk of youth offending, suggesting that cumulative effects of persistent family adversity and/or maltreatment experiences are important to understanding youth offending behaviour. Our study also reports a greater impact of CPS contact on youth offending for girls than boys— while girls have a lower absolute risk of offending than boys, the relative risk of first offence associated with CPS contact is greater for the girls than boys.
Children in out-of-home care (OOHC)
Our study found that children with a history of OOHC had the highest risk of first offence amongst the four levels of CPS contact. After controlling for a range of potential confounders, children who had experienced placement in OOHC before age 10 had a higher risk of first offence from age 10-15 years. This may be partly explained by greater prevalence of behavioural and psychological problems observed amongst children in OOHC [41], or relatedly by the severity of maltreatment that led to their placement, which may also be compounded by negative placement experiences. There is evidence to suggest that placement instability (frequent placement changes) [42-45] and some forms of OOHC placement, including residential care and group homes can also increase the risk of offending behaviour [43, 44, 46, 47]. There is also research that suggests that the behaviour of young people in OOHC is more likely to come to the attention of the police [48, 49]. Together, these findings highlight the urgent need to ensure that OOHC services are responsive to the complex needs of these children and that preventive practices are in place to ensure that trauma-related behaviours are not unnecessarily criminalised.
Similar risk of children with substantiated and unsubstantiated notification
Our results demonstrate that the risk of a first offence for children with a record of one or more unsubstantiated notifications is more likely to be similar to children with substantiated notifications than to children with no CPS contact, before age 10 years. As has been highlighted in similar studies [50-52], while the threshold for substantiation may conform to a threshold for a statutory child protection response it is not sufficiently sensitive to differentiate risk for youth offending in the population. Drake’s ‘harm/evidence model’ provides a two-dimensional theoretical framework that may help to clarify these findings [53]. Under such a model, there might be unsubstantiated notifications that indicate high levels of harm but for which there is insufficient evidence, moderate levels of harm that fail to meet the threshold of the agency guidelines or legislation, even unsubstantiated notifications that could be “serious warning signs of future problems that are not, in themselves, technically maltreatment” [50]. The inclusion of unsubstantiated notifications in this study has provided clearer insight into this under-recognised pathway into youth offending. This finding is also important when planning preventive interventions for which a record of CPS contact, at any level, is an important marker for inclusion in targeted programs.
Persistence and timing of CPS contact
Although our findings point to the importance of including unsubstantiated notifications in studies of contact with the youth justice system, other dimensions of CPS contact such as persistence and timing of notifications and substantiations appear to be equally important. The findings of our study suggest that the persistence and timing of maltreatment have greater effects on subsequent contact with the youth justice system than whether or not a notification is substantiated. For both boys and girls, the groups of children with the highest risk of first offence were those children who had notifications in early childhood and substantiations in middle childhood (the NS group) or substantiated notifications in both periods of childhood (the SS group). Of note, is that after age 14 years, those girls with unsubstantiated notification in both periods of childhood (the NN group) had a relatively higher risk of first offence than those children with no record of CPS contact before age 10 years.
Previous studies have found that adolescent-limited maltreatment, that is maltreatment that occurs exclusively in adolescence (as often defined by substantiations during this period), is a stronger risk factor for youth offending behaviour than maltreatment limited to the childhood years. However, our findings highlight the potential risk of misclassification when unsubstantiated notifications are not included in the analysis of the link between child maltreatment and youth offending. For example a child with a record of an unsubstantiated notification in early childhood and substantiated notification in middle childhood may be incorrectly classified in a ‘middle childhood limited maltreatment’ group, while children that have substantiations at early childhood and unsubstantiated notifications at middle childhood, could be classified in a ‘early childhood limited maltreatment’ group; when in reality, both groups of children may be more accurately considered to have experienced ‘persistent maltreatment’, a group that has higher risk of adverse outcomes and greater need for support. In a population with a high prevalence of youth offending, it is important to identify the different trajectories of CPS involvement in childhood that can better inform the timing and appropriateness of statutory responses and preventive interventions that contribute to reducing the risk of youth offending
Implications
Our study has several important implications. First, the high level of CPS contact of NT Aboriginal children, who are later at risk for contact with the youth justice system, presents an opportunity for early developmental crime prevention [54]. Prevention initiatives should not only be targeted towards families with children who have substantiated maltreatment but should be expanded to include those with unsubstantiated notifications. Children with unsubstantiated notifications are also at increased risk of contact with the youth justice system, which indicates the need for family support services for these children even in the absence of meeting the threshold for a statutory child protection response [9]. Although there is scant evaluation [55] of either general or Aboriginal-specific prevention programs in Australia [4, 56, 57], internationally there has been strong evidence for family-based programs (such as behavioural parent training) in reducing delinquency and antisocial behavior in children [58] and for family-focused interventions that adopt a population level approach to parenting support [59]. In Canada, the National Crime Prevention Centre has built a resource containing ‘promising’ programs for Aboriginal populations [60, 61]. One example is the Kwanlin Dun First Nation’s Project, a family-focused prevention program that targets parents with children between the ages of 0-6 years who are considered at high risk of crime and victimization with the aim of reducing the risk factors associated with crime by incorporating culturally specific components, including recognition of the extended family and various cultural preferences, into family home visitations [62]. An evaluation of this program found that only 5% of the program clients reported contact with the CPS during the time of study, compared with 35% of the comparison group [62]. Considering the high social and financial costs of criminal justice in the NT , there is a great need for effective crime prevention programs [54] through early intervention programs that prevent CPS contact.
The second implication is the demonstration of the utility of linked administrative data to identify groups of children who may benefit from early support and intervention. Linked administrative data can also be used to develop a tool, using a risk algorithm, that can be applied to identify groups of children who may benefit from scaled support to reduce contact in the criminal justice system. Such a tool can take account of cultural, gender and ethnic differences that are associated with the over-representation of Aboriginal children in both systems [63].
The third implication is the importance of interagency collaboration, corroborating the recommendations of the Royal Commission which also stressed the need to develop a workforce equipped to deal with the complex needs of children who crossover between the child protection and youth justice systems [14]. This is particularly important in settings with relatively high prevalence of both child maltreatment reports and youth offending behaviour, such as the NT where it has also been established that community-level influences contribute to the high risk of youth offending [64]. This and other similar studies also reinforce a separate recommendation of the Royal Commission calling for more research into place-based strategies for community safety and crime prevention [63] to inform a whole-of-community approach and inter-agency collaboration to child protection and youth justice.
The fourth implication is the need for broader public health initiatives that recognise the complex range of factors (individual, familial and contextual influences) that underpin both child maltreatment and youth offending. To address these contextual influences as well as the range of adverse health and social outcomes associated with CPS contact, it is important that early intervention initiatives designed to be implemented through the CPS be embedded within a more general public health framework that recognises the complex and multiple needs of vulnerable children. Importantly, it is within a public health framework that the socio-historical context that underpins the over-representation of Aboriginal children in both child protection and youth justice services can be recognised and inform culturally appropriate CPS responses and associated preventive interventions.
Strengths and limitations of study
There are a number of strengths of our study. First, the use of population-level linked data provides comprehensive coverage and representativeness of the study population. Second, the analysis has focussed on a high need population and was stratified by sex resulting in findings that support culturally relevant and sex-specific responses. The analysis also incorporates an appropriate comparison group of Aboriginal children with no record of CPS contact.
There are also limitations to our study. Firstly, the analysis has been restricted to the outcome of first event and not subsequent events, which limits the reporting to prevalence of first offence and does not include assessment of the frequency of youth offending [32] nor the analysis of the relationship of CPS contact with varying types of offences. Secondly, to maintain the correct temporal order between CPS contact and youth offending required for longitudinal analysis, we have confined our analysis to CPS contact before age 10 years. CPS contact with older children may also be an important opportunity for intervention but was not explored in this study. A third limitation is the outcome measure for youth offending is based on court data and does not use police data which contains additional information on apprehension and youth diversion. Finally, information on parental factors, which are potential confounders, were not available for inclusion in this study.