Crossover Kids: When Family Violence Victims Become Youth Justice Statistics

To finish the week, we continue to explore the theme of young people’s rights this time through a piece by Ananya Awasthi, research assistant at the Centre for Human-AI Information Environments (CHAI) at RMIT University and Master of Public Policy graduate. In this blog, Ananya writes about crossover kids who are children involved in both the child protection and criminal justice systems and makes the case for greater communication lines and information sharing between these areas.

At eight, her file was opened because someone else hurt her: a family violence report, a caseworker's visit, the system stepping in as it was meant to. By fifteen, her file was opened again, but for something she'd done, as if the eight-year-old and the fifteen-year-old were two separate problems the government happened to be managing, not one child whose interactions with government systems began with victimisation. She's what the system calls a "crossover kid", a child with involvement in both the criminal justice and child protection systems. And she is nowhere near alone.

A 2019 study by the Sentencing Advisory Council of Victoria, the first in a three-part Crossover Kids series, followed 5,063 children sentenced or diverted through the Children's Court. More than a third (1,938 children) had at least one child protection report before they offended. For almost one in five (892 children), the Children's Court had taken the matter further, issuing a child protection order confirming that the child was in need of protection. The case study above is therefore not rare. Nor is the girl fictional. She reflects reality, and she is one of thousands.

Early intervention was supposed to catch this

Victoria's family violence reforms, implemented in 2017 in response to the 2016 Royal Commission into Family Violence, were built to identify and respond to children’s exposure to family violence as early as possible. The Multi-Agency Risk Assessment and Management (MARAM) framework exists so that a child's exposure to violence at home is identified, assessed and acted upon, rather than left to resurface years later as something else, such as through youth offending. However, it is not designed to follow a child once that intervention ends, because by the time these children are back in front of a court, it is a different system asking a different question entirely. Early intervention catches a particular moment. It was never built to track the years a child can drift between the child protection and the youth justice systems.

The Australian Institute of Criminology's case-file audit of 300 crossover children in 2020 found that they presented with more serious offending profiles than other court-involved children. This does not necessarily mean they were more dangerous; rather, their histories often included earlier and more extensive contact with child protection and other services, highlighting how much had happened before they reached youth justice. The second report of the  Sentencing Advisory Council series found 55% of children who offended after entering residential care (out-of-home care run by paid staff, rather than family or foster carers) didn't offend until during or after that placement began. For some children, offending began around the time they entered residential care. This does not mean residential care caused the offending, but it shows how major changes can coincide with a period of increased vulnerability.

The impact isn't spread evenly

The first report in the Sentencing Advisory Council series further found that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were significantly overrepresented among crossover children compared with their share of the population. The second report by the council also found the gap is worse in regional Victoria than in Melbourne, defined as everywhere outside Melbourne where a case can be heard in court. For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, and for children in regional areas, that disadvantage starts earlier and goes deeper: they are less likely to receive support early in life, which means fewer opportunities to intervene before they come into contact with the justice system.

I've seen this from another angle, working on a policy brief examining solitary confinement in youth detention: the same children who show up in crossover statistics are disproportionately likely to end up isolated once inside the system, a response to behaviour that, in a family violence context, would have been read as a trauma response requiring support, not punishment.

What would it take to change this

The Sentencing Council’s third report in the series, published in June 2020, points toward something more structural than another risk-assessment tool. It proposes stronger information-sharing between Family and Criminal Divisions of the Children’s Court, a potential “crossover list”, and dedicated child protection workers to support crossover kids. It also raises the possibility of legislation requiring courts to consider trauma, child protection involvement and experiences of out-of-home care when sentencing.

This blog began with the story of one child. But it is a story that is repeated thousands of times across Victoria's courts. The reforms do not need to start from scratch. The Sentencing Council has already identified practical ways to connect these systems: dedicated workers, better information sharing and sentencing laws that recognise trauma and child protection histories. What is missing is turning those proposals into practice.

Content Moderator: Alexa Ridgway

Photo by Shannon Dinh (Unsplash)