Surveillance of Domestic Violence Using Text Mining Outputs From Australian Police Records

Abstract

In Australia, domestic violence reports are mostly based on data from the police, courts, hospitals, and ad hoc surveys. However, gaps exist in reporting information such as victim injuries, mental health status and abuse types. The police record details of domestic violence events as structured information (e.g., gender, postcode, ethnicity), but also in text narratives describing other details such as injuries, substance use, and mental health status. However, the voluminous nature of the narratives has prevented their use for surveillance purposes. We used a validated text mining methodology on 492,393 police-attended domestic violence event narratives from 2005 to 2016 to extract mental health mentions on persons of interest (POIs) (individuals suspected/charged with a domestic violence offense) and victims, abuse types, and victim injuries. A significant increase was observed in events that recorded an injury type (28.3% in 2005 to 35.6% in 2016). The pattern of injury and abuse types differed between male and female victims with male victims more likely to be punched and to experience cuts and bleeding and female victims more likely to be grabbed and pushed and have bruises. The four most common mental illnesses (alcohol abuse, bipolar disorder, depression schizophrenia) were the same in male and female POIs. An increase from 5.0% in 2005 to 24.3% in 2016 was observed in the proportion of events with a reported mental illness with an increase between 2005 and 2016 in depression among female victims. These findings demonstrate that extracting information from police narratives can provide novel insights into domestic violence patterns including confounding factors (e.g., mental illness) and thus enable policy responses to address this significant public health problem.

Mental Illness Concordance Between Hospital Clinical Records and Mentions in Domestic Violence Police Narratives: Data Linkage Study

“…Further, apart from those codes indicating presentations due to psychoactive substance abuse, the recorded codes referred to medical reasons for hospitalization that were unlikely related to domestic violence. This supports the idea that hospitals only see a small fraction of conditions arising from domestic violence situations or do not screen admitted individuals for domestic violence [37,38], which are recognized as limitations of the current domestic violence surveillance [36].…”

“…Our findings indicated that the NSWPF encounter myriad mental illnesses in the context of domestic violence with more than 120 types identified [32,34]. This further demonstrates the usefulness of employing police narrative data for surveillance and monitoring purposes as we have previously suggested [36].…”

“…We recently demonstrated that these event narratives contain rich information on perpetrators and victims of domestic violence such as mental illness [32], victim injuries, and abuse types [33]. We also demonstrated that such information could be extracted automatically, and that it could be used for population-wide domestic violence monitoring, surveillance, and prediction of domestic violence-related offences [34][35][36]. While other sources of domestic violence data might offer complementary information that will help to understand domestic violence, barriers to fully display its incidence and prevalence exist [37,38], leading to a potentially underrepresentation of this public health problem.…”

Untitled

“…Чотири найпоширеніші психічні захворювання (зловживання алкоголем, біполярний розлад, депресія, шизофренія)однаково притаманні потерпілим як чоловічої, так і жіночої статі. Однак у жінок-жертв частіше спостерігається депресія (Karystianis et al, 2022).…”