Cross-over kids: effective responses to children and young people in the youth justice and statutory Child Protection systems
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The study set out to examine the extent to which children and young people before the Criminal Division of the Victorian Children's Court were also clients of the statutory Child Protection system, and to better understand the characteristics of this group.It aimed also to discover the factors which contribute to the entry and entrenchment of these children in the criminal justice system.A mixed methods research design was adopted, with data collection from Children's Court file audits, and key stakeholder consultations, including focus groups and individual interviews. Proportion of children before the Children's Court who are cross-over childrenThe study found that across the court locations examined, 22% of the children before the Criminal Division were current or historical statutory Child Protection clients, and 12% had concurrent involvement in both Criminal and Family Divisions.The Latrobe Valley Court in regional Victoria had a substantially higher proportion of children with current or prior statutory Child Protection involvement (36%), compared to the metropolitan Courts in Melbourne (20%) and Moorabbin (18%). Key characteristics Poverty and cumulative adversityCross-over children typically come from a background of socio-economic disadvantage, with parents who were challenged in their capacity to protect and support their children.Family violence exposure, alongside household 2.2 Recent government and policy attention to cross-over children Concern about such over-representation of young people from child protection backgrounds in the youth justice system is a national issue.They are children whose circumstances have repeatedly been brought to attention in Australian reports, publications, and government Inquiries.In 2017, the review of Victorian Youth Justice services 9 , the NSW Child Protection Inquiry 10 , and the Final Report of the Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory 11 all raised concerns about this group of young people.Persistent calls for action are evident also internationally, in research and policy canvassed in the US 12 , UK 13 , New Zealand 14 , and Canada 15 .Despite acknowledgement of such concerns, there remains a lack of knowledge about this 'cross-over' group of children, and little evidence about the most effective responses. Previous cross-over children researchThe limited research to date suggests greater disadvantage and complexity are present amongst the cross-over group compared to the overall youth justice population 16 .We know, for instance, that children from child protection backgrounds have a younger age of first contact with the criminal justice system compared to the overall youth justice population 17 , and that this younger onset is associated with an increased risk of progression to adult criminal justice system involvement 18 .The limited Australian data, arising from NSW, also evidences higher rates of violent physical and sexual victimisation, neglect, cognitive and mental health difficulties, educational and social isolation and exclusion among cross-over youth compared to the broader youth justice population 19 .
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".