Victims Evidence and Insights Pack
The Youth Justice Board (YJB) has published a Victims: Evidence Pack summarising findings following a call out to academic specialists in victims within the YJB Academic Liaison Network. An updated Code of Practice for Victims of Crime (Victims’ Code) is expected. The Victims: Evidence Pack is due to be revised accordingly.
Details
Key Data
- A survey suggests:
- 39% of victims had carried out violence;
- 53% of perpetrators had also been victims;
- 49% of victims who needed medical treatment said they had also perpetrated violence; and
- 77% of perpetrators whose actions caused injury had themselves been victims.
- More than half of teenage children in ‘gangs’ had been criminally exploited.
- 7.5% of 13–17-year-olds were either criminally exploited, frequently missing from home or in a ‘gang’; equivalent to 280,000 teenage children.
- There are evidence gaps to be addressed. For example, there is limited and inconsistent ethnicity recording for child victims in police, health and safeguarding data and there is little quantitative national data on victimisation for Gypsy, Roma and Traveller children, despite their over-representation among children in contact with the youth justice system.
Factors Impacting Victimisation
Factors such as ethnicity, gender, place, family and care, education, identity, discrimination, substance misuse and online activity are common factors impacting the propensity for victimisation of children.
A study has found that having previously committed a criminal offence, financial difficulties, living in an urban and/or deprived area, parental involvement with the police and being a boy were the strongest predictors of poly-victimisation (i.e. repeated and overlapping forms of harm).
Pathways between Victimisation and Offending
- Research has found 37% of children involved with serious youth violence, and 42% of children involved in ‘gangs’ have experienced domestic abuse.
- Feeling unsafe is strongly associated with weapon possession among 13–17-year-olds. 79% of teenage children who had carried a weapon in the past year had been a victim of violence. These children were also 14 times more likely to have been a victim of repeated incidents of violence, suggesting that cycles of violence may drive some children to arm themselves for defence, retaliation or other reasons.
- The HM Inspectorate of Probation found that children often view ‘gangs’ as meeting fundamental needs for status, friendship and safety in environments where support from family or services is absent.
- Children experiencing less visible or less extreme forms of exploitation, such as socioeconomic pressure, coercion or trauma, are often excluded from being labelled as Child Criminal Exploitation (‘CCE’) victims, as practitioners struggle to define and apply thresholds for exploitation. This exclusionary practice conflicts with the Child First approach by overlooking the complex realities of many children’s lives and failing to address their unmet needs.
Children’s Experiences as Victims
- Although the Victims’ Code sets out specific entitlements for children, many have reported failing to be informed of their rights. Analysis has found that information and explanations were often incomplete or unclear and directed at parents rather than at children themselves, and that engagement with children was sometimes unsuitable and used inappropriate, harm-minimising and victim-blaming language.
- For children involved in county lines, CCE, gangs or serious youth violence, the distinction between ‘victim’ and ‘offender’ is often blurred. Whether a child is treated as a victim can depend on their understanding of exploitation and how closely they fit professionals’ expectations of an ‘ideal victim’.
- School staff sometimes punish behaviour linked to trauma (such as non-attendance), rather than recognising it as a response to victimisation.
Interventions
Interventions available in the attempt to break the link between victimisation and offending include restorative justice, A&E Navigator Programmes, focussed deterrence, trauma-specific therapies, Independent Sexual Violence Advisors and Children & Young Person’s Independent Sexual Violence Advisors.
Youth Justice Services across the country are adopting various means of supporting child victims of crime.
Commentary
The YJB Victims: Evidence Pack provides an insight into the level and type of victimisation impacting children generally, and how such victimisation might lead to criminal activity.
The potential for early exposure to victimisation (for example, in cases of domestic abuse and CCE) necessitate a multi-agency approach, to educate:
- children on what it means to be a victim of crime and how to articulate that they have been victimised; and
- authorities and those that work with children on the connections between victimisation and offending and means of breaking the link.