How Much Contact Is Related to Intimate Partner and Family Violence Exposure? Assessing the First Police Interaction for Early Adolescent Youth and Their Involvement with Police throughout Childhood

Background and Purpose: Prior research on adolescent involvement with policing services has most often focused on delinquency and crime, however, children and youth can become involved with police for a wide variety of concerns, relating to their exposure to intimate partner and family violence (IPFV), their individual safety, or community safety. To date there has been a lack of research that describes the nature and developmental progression of childhood and adolescent involvement with policing services for issues relating to their health and safety. Using a longitudinal secondary police administrative dataset from Ontario, Canada, the authors describe the first police contact for a sample of early adolescent youth (ages 12-14), along with their prior police contacts throughout childhood (ages 0-11). In doing so, we explored how much contact is related to IPFV, and whether primary prevention insights can be gleaned by assessing police interaction patterns across developmental periods.

Methods: Secondary police records data spanning from 2002 to 2014 were included into the study. Early adolescent youth (ages 12-14) who were involved with the police from 2012-2014 were included in the sample (N = 5,609), along with their childhood police interactions and their baseline early adolescent interaction (N = 14,658). Using the Statistics Canada (2019) uniform crime reporting manual, each police interaction was first categorized into three broad categories (criminal, non-criminal, tickets), which then were further categorized into ten sub-categories. Univariate analyses were used to describe the nature of police interactions for the sample, during early adolescence and throughout childhood. Latent class analysis was used to explore childhood police interaction patterns.

Results: Analyses of the police data found that 57% (n = 3,206) of baseline contacts for early adolescent youth were due to witnessing a police-reported event, with approximately 30% of witness cases being related to exposure to IPFV (n = 952). 35% of youth first became involved with police as a person of interest, most often in youth conflict cases, and just 5% of youth became first involved with police as a victim, most often in property damage or theft cases. IPFV was the top reason for early adolescent police involvement, making up 20% of all cases (n = 1,115). 47% (n = 2,619) of the sample had prior involvement with police during childhood. IPFV was the top reason for childhood police involvement, making up 28.4% of all childhood police interactions. Latent class analysis revealed seven different patterns of childhood police contact, with four patterns involving childhood exposure to IPFV.

Conclusions and Implications: According to our results, children and youth are involved with police for a wide variety of concerns, with IPFV being amongst the most frequent reasons for police contact for this population. Future projects will continue to follow the sample of youth throughout adolescence and early adulthood to understand how police interaction patterns differ across developmental periods. Such information may be useful in highlighting the potential missed service opportunities for children and youth, especially those who have been exposed to traumatic events, including IPFV.