Police Reporting and Professional Help Seeking for Child Crime Victims: A Review

Abstract

Most crimes with child uictims are not reported to police, nor do child v i c t i m access other p m f s s i o d victim seruices

Help-Seeking and Internal Obstacles to Receiving Support in the Wake of Community Violence Exposure: The Case of Arab and Jewish Adolescents in Israel

“…As earlier work has suggested, violence exposure when it occurs outside the home (in contrast to family violence) is often not defined as a problem worthy of mental health service attention (Finkelhor et al 2001;Guterman and Cameron 1999). The lack of salience of community violence as a problem worthy of professional attention may shape how both professionals as well as informal helpers, such as friends and family, respond when adolescents divulge their experiences with violence exposure.…”

“…Finkelhor et al (2001) have posited that violence exposure in adolescence may serve to inhibit help-seeking and service use depending upon such factors as whether the violent incident is defined by victims and others involved as worthy of engaging professionals, developmental factors that may interact with violence exposure like a growing need for autonomy in adolescence, or emotional and attitudinal factors that may shape how adolescents reach out to others after exposure. Such a conceptualization underscores that engaging adolescents in psychosocial support after community violence exposure may be inhibited not only by professional and external structural obstacles, but also by a variety of internal obstacles.…”

Acute Service Delivery in a Police-Mental Health Program for Children Exposed to Violence and Trauma

“…Their age, gender and racial demographics mirrored the demographics of the specific service community involved and of the world of urban poverty (3,8,34). The majority of police-mental health consultations involved events that occurred in children's homes and encompassed the gamut of situations that come to the attention of law enforcement (14,26,(35)(36)(37). Referral was based not on prevalence of certain events within the target community but rather on decision-making by police officers with response modality determined through police and mental health consultation.…”

Caregivers' Perceptions of Child Mental Health Needs and Service Utilization: An Urban 8-Year Old Sample

“…19 Rather, adults in their lives (usually parents, especially for younger children) make decisions for children about mental health services. 16 One of the simplest proposed models of parent decision making has two broad stages, which act as filters for children to receive mental health services 6 -(1) recognition: first, parents must recognize that children have mental health problems; and (2) treatment seeking: after recognition, parents must determine that these problems are serious and that treatment will be useful. This model is presented in Fig 1. The model is intuitively appealing, although it has not been rigorously tested.…”