1. Introduction
1.1 Preamble
There is scant research on juvenile delinquency1 in the Northern Territory (NT), despite the NT having the highest rate of youth detention2, 3 and the highest prisoner recidivism rate (58.3%) in Australia.4 On an average day, in 2015–16, there were 183 juveniles under youth justice supervision and 49 juveniles in detention in the NT.2, 3 During the whole year, 270 juveniles spent time in detention.3 In the NT, it costs an average of $1540 a day to keep a juvenile in detention, with a total recurrent expenditure on detention-based supervision of
$27.56 million in 2015–16.5 Both the economic and social costs of juvenile crime and detention in the NT are high.6
NT-specific research that informs effective prevention and early intervention strategies for juvenile delinquency is urgently needed, and one area that may provide opportunity for intervention is at the time of contact of a child with child protection services. In other settings, researchers have demonstrated the link between child abuse and neglect and juvenile delinquency,7, 8 and data-linkage is increasingly being used to explore this link through a developmental and life-course perspective.9-15 This report first summarises previous analyses of linked child protection and youth justice data, which was incorporated into the NT Royal Commission report,16 and then extends this information by exploring the characteristics of child protection reports (timing, frequency, reporter source and
maltreatment type) for children involved with both the NT child protection and juvenile justice services.
The preliminary analysis presented in this report provides a foundation for more complex analyses in future research. At the conclusion this report, there is a summary of the key findings, theoretical implications and future directions for data-linkage research in the NT.
1.2 Development of a cross-agency linked data resource
Since 2009, Menzies School of Health Research (Menzies) has collaborated with the
Northern Territory Government (NTG) and the SA-NT DataLink17 data integration authority to develop the infrastructure and capacity to undertake data-linkage research. The
collaboration aims to make better use of existing administrative datasets to build the relevant evidence to inform social and public policy in the NT.
There have been NT data linkage projects in a range of research areas, but the area with the most sustained focus has been in the health and development of children and youth. The linkage of information on the same individuals across multiple data sources, including from health, education, child protection and justice, has allowed the Menzies data-linkage team to apply a developmental and life-course perspective in research. This approach allows individuals to be followed from birth through childhood and youth to understand the cumulative impacts of the many influences on a child’s development. The research is
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conducted within a framework that is ethically approved (HREC-2016-2708) and in which all information is de-identified.
A new agreement between Menzies and NT Government agencies—the Child and Youth Development Research Partnership (CYDRP)—commenced in May 2017. This research partnership supports the ongoing maintenance and development of the existing linked data repository and commissions specific studies.
1.3 Menzies’ data linkage research and the NT Royal Commission report
In July 2016, in response to concerns for the treatment of children in NT youth detention facilities, the Australian Government and NT Government established the Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory. Within the mandate of the Royal Commission was consideration of the pathways that lead into the child
protection and youth justice systems and preventive strategies that address these
pathways. Statistical information is recognised as a fundamental requirement in informing and evaluating government policy, services, prevention and intervention programs. This requirement is also acknowledged in the Growing Them Strong, Together report from the 2010 inquiry into child protection services, which stated that ‘any investment strategy for secondary and tertiary supports for children, families and communities in the NT should be based on an analysis of existing data’.18
Aware of the existing data-linkage infrastructure, during early sittings of the Royal Commission, the Commissioners requested statistical information regarding the
involvement of NT children in the child protection and youth justice services. In December 2016, Menzies submitted a statistical overview of children’s contact with the NT child protection system to the Royal Commission.19 The submission included an overview of NT children in the child protection system with a description of time trends in the rates of children’s contact with the NT child protection system and a description of associated risk factors.
In August 2017, Menzies provided a second submission to the Royal Commission that included information on the associations between a history of contact of children with the child protection services and subsequent contact with the juvenile justice system.16 The information provided to the Royal Commission was incorporated into the report of the Commission and is also reproduced as background information in Chapter 2 of this report.
1.4 Aim of this report
The information in this report builds on the Menzies submission to the Royal Commission and responds to the specific objectives of Project 1 of the CYDRP Agreement – Relationship between involvement with child protection and juvenile justice systems for NT children and youth. The description for the project proposes ‘foundational work to inform design and
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scoping the rationale and feasibility for future policy research relating to child protection and justice outcomes’.
Within the proposal, there are three objectives:
1. to describe the health, educational and social characteristics of children who have been in contact with the child protection system
2. to demonstrate the utility of available linked data to identify and describe the representation of children with child protection histories in the juvenile justice system
3. to scope the exploration of associations between child protection notifications and intervention outcomes and subsequent contact with the juvenile justice system in the NT.
The response to the first objective is presented in a separate report and provides
information on NT children to age five years who had contact with the NT child protection services between 2009–10 and 201520. This report addresses the second and third
objectives. The preparation of two reports for the single project recognises that the analysis required for the three objectives are based on the life-course experience of different
cohorts of children. There has been a ten-fold increase in the number of NT children in contact with child protection services across the period of available data from 1999 to 2016.20 The children who are described in this study, to age 16 years, were reported to child protection services at much lower rates in their early years than children born in more recent years, which will mean that the history of contact with child protection services for 16 year olds in 2015 will differ from subsequent birth cohorts.
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