From Maltreatment to Delinquency: Service Trajectories After a First Intervention of Child Protection Services

The relationship between maltreatment in childhood and delinquency in adolescence is recognized. However, the data available do not reveal what proportion of children under the supervision of child protection services (CPS) later transfer to youth legal services, nor the sequence of services provided by these two systems. This study sketches a preliminary portrait of Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA) incidence among Quebec children and adolescents as a consequence of a first crime after initial CPS case closure (N = 14,252). It quantifies the scope of the phenomenon and identifies the best predictors of YCJA incidence from among the administrative data available. Survival analysis revealed a 15.4% YCJA incidence for the entire cohort in the five and a half years following termination of initial intervention; boys between 12 and 17 years old when their initial CPS cases were closed were at the greatest risk (27.2%).     

Parent-Child Agreement on Parent-to-Child Maltreatment

Parent-child agreement on child maltreatment was examined in a multigenerational study. Questionnaires on perpetrated and experienced child maltreatment were completed by 138 parent-child pairs. Multi-level analyses were conducted to explore whether parents and children agreed about levels of parent-to-child maltreatment (convergence), and to examine whether parents and children reported equal levels of child maltreatment (absolute differences). Direct and moderating effects of age and gender were examined as potential factors explaining differences between parent and child report. The associations between parent- and child-reported maltreatment were significant for all subtypes, but the strength of the associations was low to moderate. Moreover, children reported more parent-to-child neglect than parents did. Older participants reported more experienced maltreatment than younger participants, without evidence for differences in actual exposure. These findings support the value of multi-informant assessment of child maltreatment to improve accuracy, but also reveal the divergent perspectives of parents and children on child maltreatment.     

Forensic drug intelligence: an important tool in law enforcement

Organised criminality is a great concern for national/international security. The demonstration of complex crimes is increasingly dependant on knowledge distributed within law-enforcement agencies and scientific disciplines. This separation of knowledge creates difficulties in reconstructing and prosecuting such crimes. Basic interdisciplinary research in drug intelligence combined with crime analysis, forensic intelligence, and traditional law enforcement investigation is leading to important advances in crime investigation support. Laboratory results constitute one highly dependable source of information that is both reliable and testable. Their operational use can support investigation and even provide undetected connections or organisation of structure. The foremost difficulties encountered by drug analysts are not principally of a chemical or analytical nature, but methodologies to extract parameters or features that are deemed to be crucial for handling and contextualising drug profiling data. An organised memory has been developed in order to provide accurate, timely, useful and meaningful information for linking spatially and temporally distinct events on a national and international level (including cross-border phenomena). Literature has already pointed out that forensic case data are amenable for use in an intelligence perspective if data and knowledge of specialised actors are appropriately organised, shared and processed. As a particular form of forensic case data, the authors' research focuses on parameters obtained through the systematic physical and chemical profiling of samples of illicit drugs. The procedure is used to infer and characterise links between samples that originate from the same and different seizures. The discussion will not, however, focus on how samples are actually analysed and compared as substantial literature on this topic already exists. Rather, attention is primarily drawn to an active and close collaboration between magistrates, forensic scientists, law enforcement investigators and crime analysts from different institutions with the aim of generating, using and validating relevant profiling case data as integral part of investigative and crime analysis processes. Original advances are highlighted through experiences from criminal investigations of offences related to the unlawful importation, exportation, supply and possession of illicit drugs.     

Scanning electron microscopy analysis of experimental bone hacking trauma of the mandible

The authors report on a macroscopic and microscopic study of human mandible bone lesions achieved by a single-blade knife and a hatchet. The aim of this work was to complete the previous data (scanning electron microscopy analysis of bone lesions made by a single-blade knife and a hatchet, on human femurs) and to compare the lesions of the femur with those of the mandible. The results indicate that the mandible is a more fragile bone, but the features observed on the mandible are quite similar to those previously observed on the femur. This work spells out the main scanning electron microscopy characteristics of sharp (bone cutting) and blunt (exerting a pressure on the bone) mechanisms on human bone. Weapon characteristics serve to explain all of these features.     

Serving the creditors after insolvency filings: from value creation to value distribution

This paper provides original empirical evidence on the financial outcome of insolvency filings in Europe. We adopt a cross-country analysis of the determinants of recovery rates isolating three types of creditors (junior, senior, and new money claims). We investigate the structure of recoveries on a unique hand-collected sample of bankrupt firms in France, Germany, and the UK. We initially question value maximization, and study to which extent the legal provisions prevailing after insolvency filing can influence creditors’ overall recoveries. Three procedures differ significantly from our benchmark (UK liquidations). French continuation and UK receivership exert a positive influence onto total repayments, while such influence becomes negative under French liquidation. We relate this finding to the ability of the two former procedures to improve coordination among the creditors, monitoring of the debtor, and/or incentives to file early. We then analyze value distribution by examining competition between the categories of creditors. We show that the insolvency systems do not converge. Junior and senior creditors are better served under the German and the French continuation procedures than in any other bankruptcy path. At the opposite, the UK liquidation procedures fail to satisfactorily serve the junior/senior creditors. Still, nearly all the insolvency procedures support fresh financing by protecting quite well new money claims. Overall, we do not confirm any superiority of one family of insolvency system over another, but rather stress the importance of an appropriate design of the procedures, especially regarding the incentives they create before and after insolvency filing.     

What Drives the Relationship Between Early Criminal Involvement and School Dropout?

Objective

We examine the relationship between early criminal involvement and school dropout, and analyze which factors underlie this relationship, making use of administrative data from the Netherlands.

Methods

We start by determining the unconditional correlation between early criminal involvement and school dropout, using a basic ordinary least squares model. As this association is likely to be driven by different factors, we proceed by including an extensive set of observable family and individual characteristics into the estimation model. We further proceed to models that account for the influence of unobservable heterogeneity by estimating school, class, sibling and twin fixed effects.

Results

Criminal involvement is associated with an 11 percentage point higher probability of school dropout. The magnitude of this relationship decreases gradually when we account for larger shares of observed and unobserved heterogeneity. The coefficient in the same-gender twin fixed effects model indicates a 3 percentage point higher probability of school dropout, which is statistically significant at a 10 % level. We also find that the association between criminal involvement and school dropout is stronger if juveniles are involved in severe criminal activities.

Conclusions

We conclude that the observable and unobservable factors for which we account explain around 73 % of the unconditional correlation between criminal involvement and school dropout. The remaining variation likely reflects individual-specific characteristics that are different between same-gender twins. A true treatment effect, if existing, is likely to be relatively small. At the same time, serious criminal behavior appears to causally affect school dropout.