The Effect of Social Distancing on Police Reports of Domestic Violence

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lin-chi Hsu ◽  
Alexander Henke
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Violence ◽  
Social Distancing ◽  
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 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.

scholarly journals Efforts to Protect Violence in the Households during Covid-19 in Indonesia

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 548-553
Author(s):  
Nelvitia Purba ◽  
◽  
Reynaldi Putra Rosihan ◽  
Ali Mukti Tanjung ◽  
Rudy Pramono ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Violence ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Economic Security ◽  
Social Distancing ◽  
The Social ◽  
Psychological Pressure ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
The Government ◽  
Consequences Of Violence ◽  
At Home

The social distancing appeal that the government encourages is not matched by the state's efforts to provide economic security to the community. PSBB will directly or indirectly limit the movement of the community. The teaching and learning process at schools and residents who work will be limited to working or studying at home. This limitation of activities in public spaces will have an impact on people's income, especially those in the middle to lower economy. The implementation of social distancing during the Covid-19 outbreak has increased the risk of violence against women, complicates women's economic conditions, and affirms women's social status as subordinate, or women are in a lower position than men. The formulation of the problem in this research is what is the cause of domestic violence during the covid-19 period in Indonesia, what are the prevention efforts against domestic violence during the covid-19 period. Causes of Domestic Violence During the Covid-19 Period, namely the government's appeal to the community 'at home alone', causing a separate polemic for women and children, especially those who experience economic and psychological pressure at home from extraordinary isolation measures, has prompted increasing instances of reports of domestic violence, especially women who are forced to live for months in abusive relationships. causes and consequences of violence and to prevent the occurrence of violence through primary prevention programs, policy intervention and advocacy as well as information programs and supporting initiatives through all mass media TV, social networks, cell phones.

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.

scholarly journals COVID-19 and Social Distancing Measures in Queensland Australia Are Associated with Short-Term Decreases in Recorded Violent Crime

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Leslie Payne ◽  
Anthony Morgan ◽  
Alex R. Piquero
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Violence ◽  
Sexual Assault ◽  
Violent Crime ◽  
Criminal Activity ◽  
International Travel ◽  
Social Distancing ◽  
Modeling Techniques ◽  
Travel Restrictions ◽  
Spanish Flu ◽  
Arima Modeling

Since first diagnosed in late 2019, there have been more than 4 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and more than a quarter of a million deaths worldwide. Not since the Spanish Flu in 1918 has the world experienced such a widespread pandemic and this has motivated many countries across globe to take a series of unprecedented actions in an effort to curb the spread and impact of the virus through the adoption of unprecedented domestic and international travel restrictions as well as stay-at-home and social distancing regulations. Whether these policies have altered criminal activity is an important question. In this study, we examine officially recorded violent crime rates for the month of March and April, 2020, as reported for the state of Queensland, Australia. We use ARIMA modeling techniques to compute six-month-ahead forecasts of common assault, serious assault, sexual offense and domestic violence order breach rates and then compare these forecasts (and their 95\% confidence intervals) with the observed data for March and April 2020. We conclude that by the end of April, rates of common, serious and sexual assault had declined to their lowest level in a number of years, and for serious assault and sexual assault the decline was beyond statistical expectations. The rate at which domestic violence orders were breached in Queensland has remained unchanged throughout the first two months of the pandemic.

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.

scholarly journals COVID – 19 Impact: Domestic violence and the BAME community

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bindu Devkota Sapkota
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Violence ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Social Distancing ◽  
Frontline Workers ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Minority Ethnic ◽  
Disproportionate Burden

The Coronavirus disease which started in Wuhan, China, was declared a pandemic on 11th March 2020. Since then the world has come together for the trial and approval of vaccination. Meanwhile, the adopted approach to prevent and slow down the coronavirus is social distancing, handwashing, and use of face masks. In the UK, the government, together with the National Health Service (NHS), have taken various approaches to prevent and slow down the spread of coronavirus. These included imposing a ‘lockdown’ of the country (e.g. closure of schools, businesses, parks, leisure centres), along with the emphasis on handwashing, social distancing, the use of face masks and only permitting essential travel within the UK and between the UK and other countries. These approaches have been undertaken to varying extents and within different timeframes across the four nations of the UK.  Like many other countries worldwide, the UK was not prepared for such pandemics which resulted in the inability to assess the most appropriate approach to contain the spread, including the availability of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) for frontline workers, particularly those in health care. As the crisis continues several striking social issues have emerged which may, in part, be a consequence of the measures taken.  These include the escalation in domestic violence (DV) and disproportionate burden of disease among the Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) community. The impact of Covid-19 may remain for a long time if appropriate measures are not put in place to address the health inequalities in time.

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