Policing domestic abuse in an English police force: navigating definitional boundaries and exploring tensions between policy and practice

This thesis presents a case study of domestic abuse (DA) policing in an English police force area. The majority of incidents attended by frontline police officers are flagged as DA. However, the definition of DA used in research does not always reflect the cross-government definition, which is also used as the police operational definition. In particular, numerous studies focus on abuse between current or former intimate partners (CFIP) only, often restricting analysis to heterosexual couples with a male perpetrator and a female victim. Given the expansion of the cross-government definition of DA over the past few decades, the findings and conclusions of such studies are insufficient, as they exclude analysis of DA between family members and non-heterosexual CFIP. It is unclear whether the emphasis on heterosexual CFIP DA found in much of the academic literature, as well as in policy documents and cultural representations, influences how police officers engage with the concept of DA. This thesis thus takes the cross-government definition of DA as the starting point for a mixed method empirical case study of DA policing, combining documentary analysis, analysis of police administrative data, participant observation, and semi-structured interviews. Doing so opens up opportunities to explore how the political prioritisation of DA, and the concurrent expansion of the cross-government definition and the policies surrounding it, has influenced police practice, whilst simultaneously considering the impact of other factors such as managerialist police reforms. Despite the vast academic literature focused on DA, little recent work on DA policing in England and Wales analyses DA within the broader policing role. The case study approach of this thesis thus provides crucial insights, analysing the policing of DA in its broader cultural and situational context, and recognising both the competing demands and resource constraints on officers, and the complexities and ‘messiness’ of many incidents that are flagged as DA. Drawing on feminist poststructuralism, attention is given to how police officers navigate and resist definitional categories when identifying and responding to DA, with particular focus on the operational definition of DA, as well as the categories of ‘victim’, ‘offender’, ‘positive action’ and ‘positive outcomes’. Descriptive analysis of police administrative data is pursued to understand what ‘counts’ as DA in the eyes of the police institution, to examine ‘positive action’ policy adherence through analysis of arrest records, and to consider factors associated with ‘positive outcomes’. I also develop an original research method, ‘relational analysis’, to explore how police and research understanding of DA can be enhanced by ‘reading between the lines’ of police administrative data to construct network diagrams of DA, creating linkages between ‘discrete’ incidents that would otherwise be missed. Participant observation and interviews are used to consider how both broader public stories of DA, and the CJS’s increasing focus on risk assessment, influence how officers understand and respond to DA. Furthermore, in-depth case studies of particular DA-flagged incidents are presented to examine the complexities of navigating the cross-government definition of DA in context, particularly when victim-offender overlap is present. In sum, this thesis situates police understandings of – and responses to – DA in their organisational, political and cultural contexts, generating theoretical, methodological and empirical insights that can aid future research and policy developments.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Shovel, Miriam

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Gelsthorpe, Loraine
• Lanskey, Caroline

• criminology
• domestic abuse
• domestic violence
• mixed methods
• policing

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/3b465657-df56-474c-947b-a18de601489b/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.104465

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/361986