Children’s contact with police as a victim, person of interest and witness in New South Wales, Australia

Whitten, Tyson; Green, Melissa; Tzoumakis, Stacy; Laurens, Kristin R.; Harris, Felicity; Carr, Vaughan J.; Dean, Kimberlie

doi:10.1177/0004865819890894

Cited by 13 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 58 publications

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“…Administrative data about the children and their parents were linked from multiple government agencies (i.e., health, education, justice, and child protection) in 2016 (see Green, et al, 2018). Police contact data was added to the NSW-CDS in 2018 when the children were, on average, 14.7 years of age (SD=0.4; range 13 to 16 years; see Whitten et al, 2020). The current study includes Tzoumakis, Dean, et al, 2017).…”

Section: Study Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender and the intergenerational transmission of antisocial behavior

Tzoumakis

Whitten

Piotrowska

et al. 2020

Journal of Criminal Justice

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Section: Study Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender and the intergenerational transmission of antisocial behavior

Tzoumakis

Whitten

Piotrowska

et al. 2020

Journal of Criminal Justice

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“…Also, Scotland and England have differing legal systems and police records. However, linkages of police records to general cohorts have been achieved in other countries, such as the NSW-CDS cohort study in Australia 9 , and the Swedish National Cohort Study 10 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…linkage of criminal records/police data to longitudinal cohorts) that could have been cited (e.g. the NSW Child Development Study in Australia - Whitten et al (2020) 1 ). The authors rightly identify the inability to actually link the criminal records obtained for the sample to the ALSPAC dataset - this is a very serious limitation of the approach (and really undermines the whole point of linking cohorts to administrative data - it would actually be better to obtain an anonymised randomly selected sample from the criminal records database and not link it to the ALSPAC cohort at all!…”

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confidence: 99%

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The potential for linking cohort participants to official criminal records: a pilot study using the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC)

Boyd¹,

Teyhan²,

Cornish³

et al. 2022

Wellcome Open Res

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Introduction: Linking longitudinal cohort resources with police-recorded records of criminal activity has the potential to inform public health style approaches to policing, and may reduce potential sources of bias from self-reported criminal data collected by cohort studies. A pilot linkage of police records to the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) allows us to consider the acceptability of this linkage, its utility as a data resource, differences in self-reported crime according to consent status for data linkage, and the appropriate governance mechanism to support such a linkage. Methods: We carried out a pilot study linking data from the ALSPAC birth cohort to Ministry of Justice (MoJ) records on criminal cautions and convictions. This pilot was conducted on a fully anonymous basis, meaning we cannot link the identified records to any participant or the wider information within the dataset. Using ALSPAC data, we used summary statistics to investigate differences in socio-economic background and self-reported criminal activity by consent status for crime linkage. We used MoJ records to identify the geographic and temporal concentration of criminality in the ALSPAC cohort. Results: We found that the linkage appears acceptable to participants (4% of the sample opted out), levels of criminal caution and conviction are high enough to support research, and that the majority of crimes occurred in Avon & Somerset (the policing area local to ALSPAC). Those who did not respond to consent requests had higher levels of self-reported criminal behaviour compared to participants who provided explicit consent. Conclusions: These findings suggest that data linkage in ALSPAC provides opportunities to study criminal behaviour and that linked individual-level records could provide robust research in the area. Our findings also suggest the potential for bias when only including participants who have explicitly consented to data linkage, highlighting the limitations of opt-in consent strategies.

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“…Prior research from the New South Wales Child Development Study (NSW-CDS) found that almost one in six children had been in contact with the police for either a criminal or non-criminal incident by 13 years of age, and one-fifth of these children (19.9%) had a history of multiple types of contact (i.e., as a person of interest, victim, or witness; Whitten et al., 2020). The current study extends this work to determine: (i) the extent of overlap in criminal incidents of early police contact types (person of interest and victim/witness) in children and young people; (ii) the sociodemographic profiles of children and young people in early contact with police for both person of interest and victim/witness reasons and (iii) the nature of first police contacts for a criminal incident and the associated likelihood of having any further police contacts during the study period.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Examining the overlap of young people’s early contact with the police as a person of interest and victim or witness

Athanassiou

Whitten

Tzoumakis

et al. 2021

Journal of Criminology

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There is known to be considerable overlap among the victims and perpetrators of crime. However, the extent of this overlap early in life among children and young adolescents is not clear. We examined the sociodemographic profiles of young people who had early contact with police regarding a criminal incident as a person of interest, victim and/or witness, as well as the patterns of multiple police contact types from birth to 13 years of age. Data were drawn from a longitudinal, population-based sample of 91,631 young people from New South Wales, Australia. Among the 10.6% (n = 9677) of young people who had contact with police, 14.4% (n = 1393) had contact as a person of interest and as a victim and/or witness on two or more separate occasions. The most common first contact type was as a victim/witness, but those children with a first contact as a person of interest were most likely to have at least one further contact. Young people with both types of police contact were younger at first police contact, were more likely to reside in a socioeconomically disadvantaged area, and to be recorded as having an Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander background. Our findings demonstrate that, by 13 years of age, 1 in 10 young people had been in early contact with police and that a minority have contact with the police as both a person of interest and a victim/witness. These young people may represent a particularly disadvantaged group in the community who are likely to be at risk of future adversity, including repeated contact with the criminal justice system.

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Children’s contact with police as a victim, person of interest and witness in New South Wales, Australia

Cited by 13 publications

References 58 publications

Gender and the intergenerational transmission of antisocial behavior

Gender and the intergenerational transmission of antisocial behavior

The potential for linking cohort participants to official criminal records: a pilot study using the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC)

Examining the overlap of young people’s early contact with the police as a person of interest and victim or witness

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