System failing children who use violence against family members

The study, from RMIT’s Centre for Innovative Justice (CIJ), examined responses by police, courts, child protection and other social support services to adolescent violence against family members in Victoria, Tasmania and Western Australia.

Published by Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety (ANROWS), the report found that, while legislative and policy frameworks differed across jurisdictions, responses to the adolescents and their families were inadequate in all states.

Lead researcher for the Positive Interventions for Perpetrators of Adolescent violence in the home (PIPA) study and CIJ Associate Director, Elena Campbell, said the current system was perpetuating cycles of intergenerational abuse, rather than breaking them.

“One of the biggest predictors of adolescent family violence is experiencing violence as a child. Children can then grow up to use violence against those around them as a result of their own trauma,” she said.

“What is clear across the states in the study is that when a response that’s designed primarily for adults is imposed on children, it often does more harm than good.”

Adolescent violence in the home is defined as a pattern (not an isolated incident) of violent or abusive behaviour by an adolescent within their family, mostly against parents or other caregivers and siblings.

This behaviour, like other forms of family violence, may involve property damage; financial, psychological and emotional abuse; physical intimidation; and assaults, including sexual assaults.

In this study, adolescents were defined as those aged between 10 and 17 years old.

Elena Campbell said the rate of adolescent family violence in Australia is not known because many families do not report it.

“One of the most common legal responses to adolescent violence is for police to impose an intervention order, which can exclude the child from their home without any real requirement to assess the safety of where those kids will go.

“Children can also have trouble understanding and complying with the order.

“Another common scenario is for child protection to remove other siblings from the home to keep them safe.

“These examples show why many parents are reluctant to report their child to the police, or to ask for help: they know the system will not give the help that they need.”

The report also found that:

• Adverse childhood events or trauma are major contributors to adolescent violence in the home.
• There is a high rate of disability among adolescents identified by the legal system as perpetrators of family violence. A review of case files in Victoria indicated that nearly half of the children appearing before the courts as a respondent to an intervention order had a psychosocial or cognitive disability.
• Most intervention order applications are made by police, not affected family members. Of 100 applications reviewed in the Children’s Court of Victoria, only two were sought by family members; the rest were made by Victoria Police.

The report makes several recommendations for legislative and policy change in all jurisdictions.

These include a need for better training and recognition of adolescent violence in the home across relevant services, and better whole-of-family interventions including through legal responses, outreach, case management and restorative engagement.

The Chief Executive Officer of ANROWS, Dr Heather Nancarrow, said of particular importance was the report’s recommendation for early intervention for children who are victims of family violence.

“Practitioners told researchers that intervention is coming ten years too late, only once adolescents start to use violence themselves,” Nancarrow said.

“We also heard from many parts of the service system, including police and courts, that they are crying out for better mechanisms to respond.”

“What’s clear is that the system is simply not designed to take into account the extraordinary complexity that adolescent family violence usually involves.”

Media enquiries: Claire Slattery, +61 401 369 841 or claire.slattery@rmit.edu.au