Parental Incarceration and Children’s Risk of Violent Victimization: An Examination of Risks and Perpetrators’ Relationship With the Victim in Finnish Total Population Data
Ilona Nissinen, Mikko Aaltonen, Joonas Pitkänen, Pekka Martikainen, Karoliina Suonpää, Antti Latvala · 2026
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Description
Nissinen and colleagues used Finland's registers, covering 1,017,072 children. They tested whether having a jailed parent raises a child's risk of being violently hurt, and by whom. They modeled risk over time. Results were broken down by which parent was in prison and how long the child had lived with them.
A parent's jailing was tied to hazard ratios from 2.4 at the low end to 4.4 at the high end for violent victimization across childhood and the teen years. Risks ran highest for a mother's jailing, both in relative and in outright terms. That held no matter how long the child had lived with the mother. Longer time living with the jailed parent grew the link in the split results. A share of 21.2 percent to 36.4 percent of the violence against these children was done by an adult outside the family. That prompts calls for better spotting of these children.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Ilona Nissinen, Mikko Aaltonen, Joonas Pitkänen, Pekka Martikainen, Karoliina Suonpää, Antti Latvala |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 50 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |