The Association Between Psychological Distress and Young People Engaging in Family Violence: A Data-Linkage Study

Young people engaging in family violence (FV) have higher rates of mental health symptoms and diagnoses than other young people. However, the presence of a time-order relationship between mental ill-health/psychological distress and a young person's use of violence towards family members is yet to be determined. This study had two aims: the first, to investigate the mental health of young people engaging in FV with consideration to possible differences based on FV characteristics; and the second, to determine whether psychological distress (as indicated by mental health service presentations) occurs contemporaneously with young people's use of violence towards family members. This Australian study used a pseudo-prospective data-linkage design. The sample consisted of 361 young people recorded by Victoria Police between September 2016 and June 2017 for using FV. This sample of young people was linked to health records from multiple national and state datasets containing data on lifetime public mental health service presentations and diagnoses, as well as publicly subsidised private mental health service presentations from 2010 to 2018. There was a high prevalence of mental health service presentations (74%) in this sample, with 31.3% having a lifetime mental health diagnosis recorded in the public mental health system. Young people using violence across multiple intimate partner or familial relationships had higher rates of psychological distress; however, the same was not found for young people with a police-recorded FV victimisation history. There was also evidence to suggest a temporal relationship between youth family violence (YFV) incidents and psychological distress, with the odds of a young person presenting to a mental health service being higher prior to or around the same time as their police-reported YFV incident. These findings move the evidence base closer to determining a causal relationship between mental ill-health and YFV.