Parents as prisoners: maintaining the parent-child relationship: data

Children of parents who are or have been in prison often endure considerable disruption in their care, receive negligible material support and experience difficulty maintaining family ties. The children present particular challenges to legal and welfare decision makers in relation to maintaining relationships between the children and their parents. Little is known about this group of children, about the impact on them of their parents' offending and imprisonment and the ways, if any, that child welfare services and children's courts respond to their distinctive circumstances. This dataset is the output of a study (the first of its kind in Australia) undertaken in the Melbourne Children's Court with Mr Gregory Levine, Previously Senior Magistrate, Children's Court of Victoria, from June to December 2006. The study set out to identify children involved in child protection proceedings and had parents who were currently or previously in prison, or were awaiting sentencing and to examine the impact of parental imprisonment on them. There were 156 children identified by magistrates as meeting these criteria during the study period. Assoc Prof Rosemary Sheehan developed a qualitative instrument with approx. 20 variables (with up to 4 sub-variables in each) that was used to thematically analyse Children's Court case files for these 156 children. De-identified data was gathered about the child protection proceedings, parental involvement with the criminal justice system, the child's age and family composition, care arrangements, information about their health and education, and about any support services and interventions involved with the child and family. The results of the study show a lack of a co-ordinated response by the child protection and justice systems to managing these children's situations, such as a formal case-planning process that brought together the key stakeholders in decisions about children and their care.