Children in Western Australia are five times more likely to access a mental health service before they turn 18 if they are subjected to domestic and family violence.
The new report revealing this is the first of its kind in the country, run through Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety by researchers at the University of WA.
The report recommends building awareness among those working with children and young people.Credit:The Age
It investigates the link between children accessing mental health services and their experiences with violence in the home, using police data and health records for children born in WA between 1987 and 2010.
A massive 79 per cent of children who were exposed to violence at home had contact with a mental health service, compared to 16 per cent of children who accessed a service with no exposure.
They were also twice as likely to be diagnosed with a substance use disorder.
Lead researcher Carol Orr said they had looked into the cases of almost 60,000 children. Just 16,000 had experienced domestic violence but were still the clear majority accessing support.
She said the results showed a real need for early trauma-informed intervention in WA.
“This research is unique because it used data recorded by police and hospitals to cover a large sample size and broke it down by individual mental health needs,” she said.
“It showed that on average children are exposed to family and domestic violence from age six, but are not getting any form of mental health support until 12.
“There is a real disconnect there; six years when some help should have been provided but wasn’t.
“Early intervention with these kinds of issues is paramount and there needs to be a coordinated approach between government and non-for-profit agencies to fill in the gaps… there are large steps that need to be made.”
The research organisation’s chief executive Padma Raman said children experiencing domestic and family violence “need access to services that are holistic and able to address multiple needs.”
“Collaboration is the key to effective care – and to avoiding the potentially negative impacts of multiple services working in disconnected ways with children and families,” she said.
“Even where there may be no or limited visible signs of mental distress, we should be encouraging everyone in a child’s network to take the opportunity to act early and buffer the risk of mental ill health.
“Children shouldn’t have to be visibly struggling with their mental health before the trauma of violence is addressed.”
The organisation’s separate study of 10,000 women, released this year, indicated domestic violence incidents increased during the pandemic, as people lost work and financial pressures climbed.
Minister for Community Services, Children’s Interests and Women’s Interests Simone McGurk said a new strategy had been introduced, aimed at reducing domestic violence between 2020 and 2030, to combat the climbing numbers.
She said the hope was to foster a “culture that stops family and domestic violence from happening in the first place.”
“The stark reality is that Western Australia has high rates of family and domestic violence. To address this situation, effective long-term and systemic change is needed,” McGurk said.
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