Police need more training on domestic violence: study
Should focus on intervention and prevention
Police officers could show more compassion and patience when responding to domestic verbal disputes, suggests a new Canadian study.
Researchers found police have a tendency to treat situations in which there is no clear-cut crime, such as physical violence or death threats, as “one-offs.”
What they should be doing is taking the time to thoroughly investigat e whether there is more there than just a verbal spat, as victims sometimes disclose information incrementally, the researchers said.
“A victim may need to be questioned more pointedly in a sympathetic manner (and on more than one occasion) before she feels safe enough to be forthcoming about other events,” the researchers wrote in a recent article for the journal Feminist Criminology.
Led by Wilfrid Laurier University criminology professor Catherine Stewart, the researchers interviewed 30 individuals, mostly women, in Ontario who had called for police help during a verbal altercation. The participants were drawn from a pilot project that had police refer individuals involved in domestic altercations to a victim services organization with an aim to prevent verbal disputes from escalating to physical violence.
Many of the participants described long-lived patterns of abuse that included hateful language, put-downs, yelling, swearing and intimidation, the researchers reported.
“Fear” over what had just taken place or what might happen was the main reason they called police.
“I didn’t think he would cross any paths … but he went right in my face and started screaming. Like two inches, like his nose to my nose … and then I just ran into my bedroom and … called the cops,” one woman told the researchers.
Perceptions of how police handled the calls were mixed, researchers reported.
Some participants described police as supportive and said their mere presence was enough to end the aggressive behaviour.
Others, however, described being frustrated with the police response. “They were cold,” one woman reported. “I guess maybe (they should) listen more instead of accusing … or instead of making you feel like you were the criminal.”
Those who perceived themselves to be the victim felt it was unfair when police asked them to leave the home. This made them feel “doubly victimized and unjustly punished,” the researchers reported.
Several women expressed bitterness at being held equally responsible for the situation or when police charged them or threatened to charge them with a crime when, in their view, all they were doing was defending themselves when the disputes became physical.
Participants also frequently mentioned how it appeared officers had not bothered to search their databases to review past calls, meaning “victims had to explain their situations repeatedly, much to their dismay and frustration.”
Researchers acknowledged police officers face challenges when confronted with “ambiguous” situations where there is no clear aggressor or victim.
There are also times when victims don’t want to pursue charges even when a charge is possible.
That’s the reason police could benefit from more training to deal with a variety of domestic violence scenarios, the researchers said. They need greater flexibility to move “beyond a strictly law-focused approach” to one that focuses more on intervention and prevention.
Stewart said in an interview Tuesday she’s not suggesting that police officers become social workers. But they do need to be prepared to dig a little deeper, not rush to judge and not treat verbal-dispute calls as “quick writeoffs” because that could put people in even greater danger.
One option police agencies may want to explore is having patrol officers work in tandem with professional counsellors or victim-services organizations.