'Crossover' Children in the Youth Justice and Child Protection Systems

Susan Baidawi, Rosemary Sheehan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367261108
• eBook ISBN: 9781000731477
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

"Crossover" Children in the Youth Justice and Child Protection Systems explores the outcomes faced by the group of children who experience involvement with both child protection and youth justice systems across several countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.

Situated against a backdrop of international evidence and grounded in a two-year study with the Children's Court in Victoria, Australia, this book presents a cohesive picture of the backgrounds, characteristics, and pathways traversed by crossover children. It presents statistical data from 300 crossover Children's Court case files, alongside the expert evidence of 82 professionals, to generate a comprehensive picture of the lives of crossover children, and the individual and systemic challenges that they face. The book investigates the crucial question of why some children involved with child welfare systems experience particularly poor criminal justice outcomes, demonstrating how the convergence of cumulative childhood adversity, complex support needs, and systemic disadvantage produces acutely damaging outcomes for some crossover youth. It outlines the implications of the study, including how these findings might shape diversion and differential justice system responses to child protection-involved youth, and the innovative approaches adopted internationally to avert the care to custody pathway.

This book is internationally relevant and will be of great interest to students and scholars of criminology and law, social work, psychology, and sociology, as well as legal, welfare, and government agencies and policy developers, non-government peak bodies and services, professional probation services, case managers, health and mental health services, disability and drug treatment agencies, and others who work with both young offenders and the design and implementation of policy and legislation.

1 Child protection and youth offending

A cross-national concern

Susan Baidawi

Children receiving statutory child protection services due to abuse, neglect, or parental incapacity are considerably more likely to come under the supervision of youth justice services compared with other children in the community. These are internationally observed trends, identifiable across numerous Western contexts including in Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Canada. This group of children have come to be referred to as “crossover”, “dual order”, “dual jurisdiction”, or “dually involved” children, and their over-representation in youth justice systems concerns governments and legal and welfare professionals alike. This chapter outlines the critical and costly nature of these pathways, and canvasses what is known about the relationships between childhood maltreatment, child protection involvement, and youth offending. Theoretical frameworks adopted to explain the maltreatment–offending relationship are also examined. The available evidence suggests that crossover children appear, overall, to be a higher risk subgroup of the youth justice population. This observation further underscores the need to better understand crossover children's characteristics, pathways into youth justice, needs and outcomes.

Introduction

In Australia, child protection services in each state and territory investigate child abuse, neglect, and other risks of harm to children, and respond to substantiated cases via voluntary service provision or statutory court orders. While many children come to the attention of child protection services, far fewer come to be under either statutory court orders or state guardianship. During 2017–18, about 159,000 Australian children (or 1 in 35) received child protection services, including around 105,000 who were the subject of a child protection investigation, 67,200 who were on statutory care and protection court orders, and 55,300 who were removed from family and placed in out-of-home care with kinship (family) or foster (non-family) caregivers, or in residential care settings (or “group homes”) (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare 2019). Child protection involvement also occurs in situations unrelated to child maltreatment, for instance under circumstances of parental incapacity due to death or serious illness. Australian children under 18 years of age may receive child protection services in a voluntary capacity, or are the subject of statutory court orders stipulating where and with whom they should live, and what contact they may have with parents and other family (AIHW 2019). For young people previously under state guardianship during adolescence, discretionary post-care services may be available from 18 years up to 21 or 25 years of age, to support care leavers in accessing housing, education, and other services (Baidawi 2016). Government expenditure for child protection and related services in Western contexts is often substantial, totalling $5.8 billion across Australia in 2017–18 (Steering Committee for the Review of Government Service Provision 2019).

A concerning pathway

Despite attempts to reduce harms and improve the circumstances of this group, children who are involved with child protection services, particularly those removed from parental care, often experience relatively poor life outcomes. Compared to their same aged peers, young people leaving statutory care systems experience higher rates of health and mental health issues, homelessness, and early parenthood, alongside poorer education and employment outcomes (Mendes, Johnson & Moslehuddin 2011; Stein 2012). These outcomes are recognised as being shaped both by the early life adversity experienced by most of these children, and for those who are unable to reside with their parents, by the quality of their out-of-home care experiences. For those children remaining in the care of the state until legal adulthood, the frequently abrupt termination of services and supports, including housing, adds further stress to an often already challenging pathway (Mendes, Johnson & Moslehuddin 2011). Among the most troubling outcomes of child protection-involved youth is their vastly disproportionate involvement in criminal justice systems.

Across Australia, contemporary data indicate that children receiving statutory child protection services due to maltreatment or parental incapacity are 9 times more likely to offend and come under the supervision of youth justice services compared to other children in the community (AIHW 2018). Often described as a “care to custody pipeline”, this disturbing over-representation peaks at the most restrictive end of youth justice systems, in youth detention centres, where substantial proportions of children are known to child welfare services (Sentencing Advisory Council 2019). For instance, one-half of Australian children in youth justice custody between July 1, 2013 and June 30, 2017 were involved with child protection services during that same four-year period (AIHW 2018).

The group of children traversing the child protection and youth justice systems have alternately come to be known as “crossover”, “dual-order”, “dual-jurisdiction”, or “dually involved” children (Centre for Juvenile Justice Reform 2015; Herz, Ryan & Bilchick 2010). Three pathways to becoming a crossover child are distinguished based on the temporal order of each individual's involvement across the two statutory systems (Herz, Ryan & Bilchick 2010). One group includes those initially notified to child protection, who later become involved with offending whilst having ongoing involvement with child protection services. A second group of crossover children are those who historically, though no longer, received child protection services, and who are later involved with offending. A third group includes children coming to the attention of police, criminal courts, and youth justice services, who are subsequently notified to child protection authorities due to concerns for their wellbeing.

The task of capturing what is known about crossover children internationally is complicated by jurisdictional differences in child protection, out-of-home care, and youth justice systems. Additionally, these systems are typically subject to regular modifications, reflecting changes to legislation, policy, and practice. This underscores the need for contemporary data that can support researchers, policy makers, and practitioners to understand present-day trends. Definitional variations also further challenge the development of a sound evidence base concerning crossover children. For example, the precise proportion of crossover children in each system naturally fluctuates depending on how “child protection involvement” and “youth justice involvement” are each construed. Child protection involvement may be defined as a child being notified to child protection services, being substantiated for abuse and neglect (or significant risk thereof), being the subject of statutory court orders, or being placed in out-of-home care. Similarly, a child's youth justice involvement could be defined as their being arrested, or being sentenced to youth justice supervision in community or custodial settings.

Regardless of definitions, the over-representation of crossover children is apparent across several jurisdictions. In 2016–17, over one third of children in custody in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland had been in local authority care (Criminal Justice Inspection Northern Ireland 2018; Taflan 2017), and an over-representation of child protection populations in youth justice systems is also evident in research findings from Canada (British Columbia Representative for Children and Youth & Office of the Provincial Health Officer 2009; Finlay 2009) and New Zealand (Centre for Social Research and Evaluation 2010). Broadly speaking, data indicate that the deeper a child penetrates into each of the child protection and youth justice systems, the greater their likelihood of being a crossover child.

Factors influencing the maltreatment–offending relationship

As the majority of children involved with child protection services never come to be charged with offending, research efforts have focused on identifying individual, environmental, and systemic factors contributing to the over-representation of this group in the justice system. Growing research interest in crossover children has been particularly evident since the turn of the century. The developing knowledge base in this field includes contributions from the United States (e.g. Jonson-Reid & Barth 2000a; Ryan & Testa 2005), United Kingdom (e.g. Shaw 2014; Taylor 2006), Australia (e.g. Malvaso, Delfabbro & Day 2017b; McFarlane 2017; Mendes, Baidawi & Snow 2014; Sentencing Advisory Council 2019), Canada (e.g. Bala et al. 2015; British Columbia Representative for Children and Youth & Office of the Provincial Health Officer 2009; Finlay 2009), and New Zealand (e.g. Centre for Social Research and Evaluation 2010) among others.

Socio-demographic factors

As with the youth justice population more broadly, most children crossing over between child protection and youth justice systems are male (Malvaso, Delfabbro & Day 2017b; Stewart, Dennison & Waterson 2002). By way of example, Australian figures indicate that among children aged 10–17 years who received child protection services between July 2013 and June 2017, 11.1% of males and 4.7% of females had also been under youth justice supervision in the community or custody in this same period (AIHW 2018). Using these same definitions, males comprised 67% of all Australian crossover children during this period (AIHW 2018). Previous US research similarly reported that among the 1983–84 Illinois birth cohort, 14% of maltreated males offended by age 18, compared to 4% of maltreated females (Ryan & Testa 2005). While they comprise a minority of crossover children, figures indicate that female youth offenders are more likely to have come from child protection backgrounds compared to male youth offenders (AIHW 2018).

The over-representation of children from racial minorities is of concern across numerous Western child welfare and youth justice systems (AIHW 2018; Barn 2007; British Columbia Representative for Children and Youth & Office of the Provincial Health Officer 2009; National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges 2015; Sentencing Advisory Council 2019). Studies also reveal that certain minority racial groups are further over-represented among crossover children. US research, for instance, has repeatedly found that among children investigated for maltreatment, African-American children have the highest rate of entry into the youth justice system (Cutuli et al. 2016; Jonson-Reid & Barth 2000a; Ryan et al. 2007). In many countries carrying historic legacies of settler-colonialism, Indigenous peoples are notably over-represented in populations of crossover children. For example, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australian children are 17 times as likely to have been involved in both the child protection and youth justice systems compared to non-Indigenous children (AIHW 2018). Aboriginal children are similarly over-represented among Canadian crossover youth (British Columbia Representative for Children and Youth & Office of the Provincial Health Officer 2009). While there is a need to understand differences in pathways and outcomes among crossover children from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, research in these areas is still developing. The limited evidence suggests that cumulative time in out-of-home care, placement in residential care, and placement instability, while increasing the risk of convictions among Indigenous Australian crossover children, are each less impactful on their likelihood of offending compared to non-Indigenous children (Malvaso, Delfabbro & Day 2017a).

Maltreatment factors

A growing body of research makes plain the heightened risk of youth justice system contact among maltreated children (Malvaso, Delfabbro & Day 2017b; Maxfield & Widom 1996; Ryan & Testa 2005; Stewart, Dennison & Waterson 2002; Widom et al. 2018). In fact, among the most consistent predictors of youth offending are poor parental supervision and parental rejection, that is, neglect and emotional abuse of the child (Loeber & Stouthamer-Loeber 1986). Furthermore, this increased risk is not isolated to delinquency in adolescence. Rather, childhood abuse and neglect are demonstrated to increase the risk of adult criminal justice system involvement, including that related to violent offending (Maxfield & Widom 1996).

Experiences of the type, severity, timing, and duration of abuse and neglect naturally vary among maltreated children. Accordingly, studies of the maltreatment–offending relationship, primarily from the United States and Australia, have sought to understand which maltreatment-related factors increase the risk of later offending. Researches attempting to ascertain the impact of specific maltreatment types (i.e. physical, sexual, emotional/psychological abuse and neglect) on offending risk have reported somewhat varied findings. One of the challenges in discerning the impact of maltreatment type is that victims of child abuse and neglect are typically exposed to multiple forms of maltreatment. Additionally, there is some overlap in these concepts, observable for instance, by the fact that childhood physical and sexual abuse are inherently emotionally abusive experiences. Despite these challenges, several studies have found evidence of elevated offending risk among children exposed to neglect and physical abuse in particular (Jonson-Reid & Barth 2000a; Malvaso, Delfabbro & Day 2017b; Maxfield & Widom 1996; Stewart, Dennison & Waterson 2002; Widom & Ames 1994). In addition to maltreatment type, maltreatment recurrence (for example, a greater number of child protection notifications) and maltreatment that persists into adolescence have each been recognised as significant risk factors for offending among abused or neglected children (Hurren, Stewart & Dennison 2017; Ireland, Smith & Thornberry 2002; Jonson-Reid 2002; Jonson-Reid & Barth 2000a; Malvaso, Delfabbro & Day 2017b; Ryan, Williams & Courtney 2013; Sentencing Advisory Council 2019; Stewart, Dennison & Waterson 2002; Stewart, Livingstone & Dennison 2008).

Care-related factors

Children's likelihood of crossing over into youth justice services is linked with several care-related factors. In the first ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1  Child protection and youth offending: A cross-national concern
• 2  Government and policy developments related to crossover children
• 3  The characteristics and pathways of crossover children: The study explained
• 4  Court records: The profile of “crossover kids”
• 5  Crossover kids: Professionals' perspectives on offending and desistance
• 6  Culture and Indigeneity: Risk and responses for Indigenous crossover children
• 7  The nature and contexts of offending among crossover children
• 8  Crossover children: Where criminogenic risk meets systemic disadvantage
• 9  Disrupting the pipeline: Decriminalising child protection-involved youth
• Index