The Effect of Sheltering in Place on Police Reports of Domestic Violence in the US

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 362-379 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lin-chi Hsu ◽  
Alexander Henke
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Violence ◽  
The Us ◽  
Police Reports

scholarly journals Entrapment and institutional collusion: Domestic violence police reports and the ‘couple rule’ in social security law

2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-22
Author(s):  
Lyndal Sleep
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Violence ◽  
Social Security ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Couple Relationship ◽  
Violent Relationships ◽  
Social Security Payment ◽  
The Social ◽  
Police Reports ◽  
Social Security Act

In Australia’s heavily targeted social welfare apparatus, couples are assessed jointly for their eligibility for social security payment. Specific guidelines for deciding if a social security recipient is a member of a couple are provided by the ‘couple rule’ in section 4(3) of the Social Security Act 1991 (Cth). A plethora of information is used by the Department to decide if a social security recipient is a member of a couple for social security purposes. Of particular concern is the use of domestic violence police reports as evidence of a couple relationship. This article argues that the current use of police domestic violence reports in ‘couple rule’ decisions is problematic. This is because it effectively entraps women in violent relationships, provides a financial barrier to leaving and is used by perpetrators to further control their victims.

scholarly journals A cross-national comparison of police attitudes about domestic violence: a focus on gender

2017 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 214-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samara McPhedran ◽  
Angela R. Gover ◽  
Paul Mazerolle
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Violence ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Police Attitudes ◽  
Enforcement Officer ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Officer Attitudes ◽  
Cross National

Purpose The purpose of this paper is twofold. The first goal is to conduct a cross-national examination of law enforcement officer attitudes about domestic violence (DV) by comparing officer attitudes in the USA to officer attitudes in Australia. The second goal is to examine law enforcement officer attitudes about DV using a gender lens to identify whether patterns in attitudes among male and female officers in the USA are similar to those among Australian male and female law enforcement officers. Design/methodology/approach The current study involves a comparative analysis of DV attitudes in two different countries (the USA and Australia). Officers in the USA were asked to indicate their level agreement with 28 attitudinal statements about DV. The Australian survey adapted the Gover et al. (2011) instrument by including 24 of the 28 attitudinal statements. The survey followed a mixed-methods design with both quantitative and qualitative components. Bivariate analyses were conducted to determine whether attitudes varied by country and gender of the responding officers. Analyses of attitudinal questions and categorical variables (e.g. gender) were conducted using t-tests. Findings According to survey data gathered from police officers in Colorado (USA) and Queensland (Australia), male and female officer attitudes within each country are more similar than different. When comparing the overall sample of American officer attitudes to Australian officer attitudes, they significantly differ about half the time. Research limitations/implications The Australian survey had a considerably low response rate, and therefore it cannot be stated with certainty whether the responses given are truly representative of the views of Australian officers as a whole, although the demographic characteristics of the sample were comparable with the overall police population demographics. Another limitation is that not all demographic and background variables were collected by both surveys. For example, the US survey asked about officers’ ethnicity, while the Australian survey did not, and the Australian survey asked about how many DV jobs officers attended per month, while the US survey did not. Practical implications Improving knowledge about police attitudes towards DV can help to inform future policy or practice implementation, as well as training programmes and better overall responses to the pervasive and ongoing problem of DV internationally. Originality/value This is a unique and original piece of research as it is a partial cross-national replication of an existing survey. This work does have the potential for great impact in understanding and developing innovative law enforcement responses to DV. In developing such responses officer attitudes need to be considered and integrated into the response, as their opinions will guide the support of future interventions.

scholarly journals Automated Analysis of Domestic Violence Police Reports to Explore Abuse Types and Victim Injuries: Text Mining Study (Preprint)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Karystianis ◽  
Armita Adily ◽  
Peter W Schofield ◽  
David Greenberg ◽  
Louisa Jorm ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Violence ◽  
Text Mining ◽  
Automated Analysis ◽  
Public Health Research ◽  
Free Text ◽  
Large Set ◽  
South Wales ◽  
Police Reports ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

BACKGROUND The police attend numerous domestic violence events each year, recording details of these events as both structured (coded) data and unstructured free-text narratives. Abuse types (including physical, psychological, emotional, and financial) conducted by persons of interest (POIs) along with any injuries sustained by victims are typically recorded in long descriptive narratives. OBJECTIVE We aimed to determine if an automated text mining method could identify abuse types and any injuries sustained by domestic violence victims in narratives contained in a large police dataset from the New South Wales Police Force. METHODS We used a training set of 200 recorded domestic violence events to design a knowledge-driven approach based on syntactical patterns in the text and then applied this approach to a large set of police reports. RESULTS Testing our approach on an evaluation set of 100 domestic violence events provided precision values of 90.2% and 85.0% for abuse type and victim injuries, respectively. In a set of 492,393 domestic violence reports, we found 71.32% (351,178) of events with mentions of the abuse type(s) and more than one-third (177,117 events; 35.97%) contained victim injuries. “Emotional/verbal abuse” (33.46%; 117,488) was the most common abuse type, followed by “punching” (86,322 events; 24.58%) and “property damage” (22.27%; 78,203 events). “Bruising” was the most common form of injury sustained (51,455 events; 29.03%), with “cut/abrasion” (28.93%; 51,284 events) and “red marks/signs” (23.71%; 42,038 events) ranking second and third, respectively. CONCLUSIONS The results suggest that text mining can automatically extract information from police-recorded domestic violence events that can support further public health research into domestic violence, such as examining the relationship of abuse types with victim injuries and of gender and abuse types with risk escalation for victims of domestic violence. Potential also exists for this extracted information to be linked to information on the mental health status.

Domestic Violence Survivorship Among a Sample of Older African American Women: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis

2021 ◽  
pp. 088626052110665
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Burse ◽  
Rachel Voth-Schrag ◽  
Noelle L. Fields ◽  
Debra Woody
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Violence ◽  
African American ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis ◽  
White Women ◽  
Phenomenological Analysis ◽  
American Women ◽  
Analysis Process ◽  
The Us ◽  
Unemployment And Health

African American women experience domestic violence at a rate that is 35% higher than the domestic violence rate of White women. Moreover, African American women encompass 8% of the US population but account for 22% of domestic violence–related homicide victims. African American women are at greater risk for facing economic difficulties, homelessness, unemployment, and health and educational disparities due to domestic violence. However, little attention has been given to the lived experiences of older women who are domestic violence survivors. Theories of phenomenology and hermeneutics provided the theoretical framework for this study. An interpretative phenomenological analysis framework guided the research design and data analysis process. Overall, the findings pointed toward the need for generating more culturally sensitive and culturally tailored programs and services to address domestic violence in the African American community. Additionally, services are needed that include faith-based education, training, and prevention programs to enable churches and social workers to address the unique cultural needs of African American women who have endured domestic violence.

scholarly journals Writing up or writing off crimes of domestic violence? A transitivity analysis of police reports

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 48-69
Author(s):  
Patricia Canning
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Violence ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Domestic Abuse ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
National Statistics ◽  
Charging Rate ◽  
Police Reports ◽  
Participant Roles ◽  
The One

Between March 2019 and March 2020 in England and Wales (excludingGreater Manchester), there were 1,288,018 recorded incidents of domestic violence(DV, otherwise known as ‘domestic abuse’ or ‘DA’), an increase of 4.2% (51,404incidents) on the previous year (Office for National Statistics 2020). Only 56%of these were classified by police as ‘crimes’ (Office for National Statistics 2020).Additionally, despite the annual rise of DV the charging rate of suspects fell in2019–2020 by 20.5% (Crown Prosecution Service 2020). This raises two primaryquestions: 1) why are almost half of reported DV incidents not considered ‘crimes’?and 2) in spite of rising numbers of incidents, why do prosecutions continue to fall?These questions are central to this paper. A possible factor influencing attritionrates concerns the language used by police officers to record DV incidents. Thispaper, then, explores whether the linguistic choices made by police officers onjudicial reports of DV in a sample of cases collected from the year 2010 reflectimplicit attitudinal biases, that in turn, can potentially pre-empt out-of-court casedisposals within contemporaneous DV cases. If so, this may also go some way toexplaining the gap between cases reported as DV crimes and cases recorded assuch. The dataset under analysis comes from a corpus of 13 police-authored DVcases sent to prosecutors for charging decisions in one calendar month in 2010 (formore detail about the corpus, see Lynn and Canning 2021; Lea and Lynn 2012.All 13 cases were returned with a ‘simple caution’ outcome, which means thatnone progressed to prosecution. Two of these cases are used as representative ofthe 13 that comprise the corpus. The analysis of the data is carried out usingthe model of transitivity (Berry 1975; Halliday 1994) to identify participant roles,actions, and circumstances as well as their syntactic distribution. The analysisshows that officers’ lexical and syntactic choices yield patterns of agency thatdownplay suspects’ culpability on the one hand, and background victims on theother. The paper concludes by arguing that how police present agency, participantroles, and circumstantial elements in reports to prosecutors can encode a ‘preferredoutcome’ resulting in more lenient charging decisions.

Policing repeat domestic violence: Would focused deterrence work in Australia?

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Morgan ◽  
Hayley Boxall
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Violence ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Pilot Site ◽  
Focused Deterrence ◽  
Australian Context ◽  
The Us ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Barriers To Implementation ◽  
Pulling Levers ◽  
Extensive Body

Focused deterrence approaches to domestic violence have been developed in the US to increase offender accountability and ensure appropriately targeted responses to victims. While innovative, the model has strong theoretical and empirical foundations. It is based on a set of fundamental principles and detailed analysis of domestic violence patterns and responses. This paper uses recent Australian research to explore the feasibility of adapting this model to an Australian context. Arguments in favour of the model, and possible barriers to implementation, are described. Based on an extensive body of Australian research on patterns of domestic violence offending and reoffending, and in light of recent developments in responses to domestic violence, this paper recommends trialling focused deterrence and ‘pulling levers’ to reduce domestic violence reoffending in an Australian pilot site.

Improving Identification of Strangulation Injuries in Domestic Violence: Pilot Data From a Researcher–Practitioner Collaboration

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 160-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam J. Pritchard ◽  
Amy Reckdenwald ◽  
Chelsea Nordham ◽  
Jessie Holton
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Violence ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Law Enforcement Training ◽  
Domestic Assault ◽  
Physical Evidence ◽  
Police Reports ◽  
Official Police

Efforts to partner researchers and practitioners have the potential to significantly improve both research and response to non-fatal strangulation within the context of domestic violence. Non-fatal strangulation is far more common than most formal data suggest and is a highly gendered form of domestic assault often used to control or intimidate a partner; however, depending on how the assault takes place, it can leave little obvious physical evidence to an untrained investigator. The present study estimates the occurrence of strangulation cases and possible strangulation cases that may not be explicitly classified as such in official police reports due to inadequacies in law enforcement training. We offer a description of these types of cases as they compare with domestic violence police reports from non-strangulation cases. Results highlight the gendered nature of strangulation as well as the importance of practitioners and researchers critically reflecting on issues within the criminal justice system in an effort to redress inadequacies, hold offenders accountable, and save lives.

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