Family violence and runaway children in prisoner populations of Latin America

ABSTRACT

The paper aims to analyse the links between domestic violence and children abandoning their family home, using new empirical evidence from the Latin American inmate population. Interest in this group is obvious, as it is precisely because they ran away from home that many may have ended up in a criminal environment and finally, in prison. Among prison inmates, family violence is a strong predictor of abandoning the childhood home. Such inmates have a significantly higher risk of reporting having run away from home at least once before the age of 15, irrespective of their family, peer/school, and neighbourhood context. Domestic violence is a risk factor, triggering a series of events that result in children running away from their homes (victims of domestic violence or witnesses to it). This study suggests a relationship between different configurations of domestic violence and runaways, and provides an additional benefit by relating these two elements to the inmate population.

KEYWORDS:

• Domestic violence
• family context
• runaway children
• inmate population
• latin america

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/01924036.2022.2110912

Notes

1. “Prison population survey (UNDP) – 2013/2014”. http://www.undp.org/ (accessed on 08/01/2018)

2. Only the national samples follow a criterion of conglomerates of prisons. The regional samples do not use conglomerates of this type.

3. These are the Odd Ratios (OR)) for Model 2 and are presented rounded. The results are 1.340, 1.547, and 1.233 respectively. All OR are presented rounded to one decimal throughout the manuscript.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carolina Agoff

Carolina Agoff is a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) since 2004. She received her PhD in Psychology from Free University of Berlin (Germany) in 2001. Her main research interest is the empirical study of gender violence in different settings, such as in indigenous communities or universities, and among undocumented latino workers in the USA or lower class urban working women. Her published work appears in journals such as Hispanic Journal of Behavioural Sciences, Journal of Research in Gender Studies, International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family, Gender, Work & Organization, Journal of Family Violence, and Violence against Women. Her current work focuses on the prison population in Mexico City with a narrative criminological approach.

Gustavo Fondevila

Gustavo Fondevila is Professor at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching (CIDE). National Researcher of the National System of Research -level III- (SNI) and of the National Council of Science (CONACYT). He concentrates on empirical and comparative quantitative criminology.

Carlos Vilalta-Perdomo

Carlos Vilalta is Professor at the Center for Research in Geospatial Information Sciences (CentroGeo) in Mexico City. He studies the geography of crime and fear of crime, prevention policies, criminal statistics, and prison populations. He has been visiting researcher in UC San Diego, U. of Florida, Cambridge, McGill, U of Missouri in St. Louis, Washington University in St. Louis, U. of Houston and UNC-Chapel Hill. He holds a PhD in Urban Studies from Portland State University.