The Police Impact on Domestic Violence

Police play a vital role in domestic violence. This is true because police are often the first contact when women report an incident of domestic abuse. How police respond is crucial in assisting women in abusive relationships. It is important to realize that the criminal justice system is predominately dominated by men, and the offenders are also normally men, while the victims are often women. The significance of these gendered divisions is that the criminal justice system has largely been based on a system of patriarchal beliefs, and the abusive actions by men also reflect the patriarchal society in which we live. In order to understand the police response to domestic abuse over the last few decades, it is important to first understand the history and importance of domestic abuse.

Domestic violence against women is very much prevalent in today’s society. It is a fact that women’s greatest risk of assault is from their intimate partners. Women are more likely to be injured, attacked, raped or killed by a current or former intimate partner than by anyone else (Brown 1994, 41). Domestic violence is often referred to as “spouse abuse”, however a term such as this, “…obscures the gendered nature of abuse. The focus becomes criminal activity between spouses rather than the systemic, gender-related aspect of women’s experience”(Minaker 2001, 103).

In this paper, I refer to the term domestic violence or domestic abuse, however what I am specifically referring to is really domestic violence against women, because this more accurately reflects the problem of systemic violence against women in intimate relationships. Domestic violence against women can be defined as, “any physical, psychological, or emotional abuse by an intimate against his female partner, regardless of whether she is a wife, ex-wife, girlfriend or friend” (Daniels 1997, 23). Domestic does not only refer to violence that occurs within the home, but any violence that occurs in a relationship between two people (Daniels 1997, 23).

Some of the history surrounding the abuse of women begins with the English Common Law that stated it was acceptable for a man to beat his wife with a whip or stick as long as it was no bigger than the width of his thumb. Historically, man’s power and domination over his wife was legitimized. This enabled men to use violence and threats of violence to control her, as women at that time were seen as the property of their husbands (Brown 1994, 14) and were not even considered a “person” under the law until the suffragette movement in the early twentieth century (Hick 2002, 150). Women were considered mentally and even morally inferior to men (Buzawa & Buzawa 1992, 3), and this view persisted among men for years, and continues among many men today.