Engaging Ideas - coming up in 2006
Wednesday, 7 June 2006
Transitions and Turning Points: Examining Links between Child Maltreatment and Juvenile Offending - Dr Anna Stewart.
This presentation has been rescheduled from March 2006 to 7 June 2006.
This research examines the links between child maltreatment and juvenile offending by analysing data from young people born in 1983 and 1984 who had contact with the Department of Families for a child protection matter. This data was then matched to juvenile offending records, to obtain a longitudinal view of these young people’s life course of maltreatment and subsequent offending.
The young people were put into six distinctive groups, distinguished by the frequency and duration of the maltreatment and the age of onset.
One of the key findings of the research was that for two of the six groups, victimisation experiences peaked around the transition from preschool to primary school. A further two groups peaked at the transition from primary school to secondary school. Significantly, different offending rates were found among children in each of these trajectories even after controlling for gender and Indigenous status. The research also indicated that children who experienced victimisation in adolescence were more likely to offend than children who only experienced maltreatment before adolescence.
These findings therefore have important implications for our understandings of the pathways from child maltreatment to juvenile offending.
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