Institutional Persistence: Involvements with Child Protective Services, the Criminal Justice System and Mental Health Services across Childhood, Adolescence and Early Adulthood in Denmark

The pairwise overlaps in system involvement between child protective services (CPS), mental health services and the criminal justice system are well-documented. Yet, less is known about how contact to these three systems evolves as children age, and how children’s trajectories through these institutions should be conceptualised. In this article, we use administrative data on the full population of Danish children born 1982–1995 that had contact to at least one of the three systems before turning twenty-one. Theoretically, we argue that children’s trajectories of institutional contacts can be understood as a moral career as suggested by Goffman. Empirically, we study how children move between and are retained within the three systems across childhood. We find that early contact originates with CPS but branch out through both overlap and transitions to the other systems. Further, across age, there are high levels of retention within the systems, and clear gendered dynamics play out as children age. We argue that children’s trajectories across age can be viewed as moving from a position as a subject at risk to a position as subject of risk.