A review of the different explanatory variables used to understand the influence of engagements with the police, social services, and the educational environment on youth violent offending

Abstract

Background Youth related violent crimes are an ongoing public issue. The age crime curve demonstrates that rates of offending and violent offending are highest amongst this demographic. Numerous studies exist which seek to improve understanding of youth violence by considering the impact that engagements with bodies including the police, social services and the education system have on the outcome. To date, a gap remains in the literature, which is a single review that combines these studies to clearly demonstrate which engagements are statistically significant and which appear, at risk of a type 2 error, to be statistically insignificant. It is to this end that this review has been performed, to address the gap in knowledge and provide a baseline of understanding, effective up to January 2023. Methods Using a robust and reviewed search strategy, 8 public databases have been searched alongside several sources of grey literature to identify relevant papers for this review. Results From an initial total of 6,728 papers, a total of 28 papers were included in the final stage of this review. These papers consist of: papers relating primarily to police exposures, 1 paper relating primarily to social services exposures and 23 papers relating primarily to educational exposures. Conclusions This review has provided clarity on the different engagements that have been considered by researchers. This review further clearly disseminates between exposures found to be statistically significant and those found not to be. This review provides an important temporal benchmark for future investigations which can now save time regarding performing searches for work completed to date by using this review as their starting point.