Victims as Offenders: The Paradox of Women's Violence in Relationships

Chapter 3: The Research Project: Female Offenders and the Criminal Justice System

Female Offenders and the Criminal Justice System The material presented in this book reflects the culmination of a three-year research project. Through my various professional connections and friendships within the domestic violence community in a mid-Atlantic state, people would tell me about their concern that they were seeing more and more women arrested on domestic violence charges. They wondered what it meant: Was there something triggering an increase in women’s use of force? Was there a change in criminal justice policies that affected police arrest strategies? Or some other explanation? I was puzzled, too, despite the anecdotal nature of such informal inquiries. I began to search the scholarly literature, finding that this phenomenon was occurring all across the country. It clearly warranted a closer investigation. The state in which the research was conducted is small, with a total population in 1999 of 760,691. It has only three counties (County A is the largest county with 491,407 inhabitants; County B, 143,007; County C, 126,277). The state’s police departments do not follow state-wide mandatory arrest policies , but rather operate with pro-arrest emphases that reflect considerable variation across state, county, city, and local police departments. In 1984 the state code gave police the authority to arrest without a warrant for misdemeanor offenses committed outside the officer’s presence. In 1988 the state’s police chief council adopted a model law enforcement policy for domestic violence, and individual departments were then free to adopt all or part of the protocol. The protocol allows police to retain discretion in misdemeanor cases, as long as the 38 The Research Project Chapter 3 decision not to arrest is fully documented. The protocol does not address the determination of primary aggressor. The state’s efforts to document domestic violence incidents came on the heels of several well-publicized domestic fatalities in which it was generally believed that if the police had responded more quickly and seriously, some homicides or suicides might have been prevented. (For instance, in the southern part of the state, a police officer had responded to a domestic dispute the night before but did not make an arrest. The next day, the husband killed his wife and another relative, and then himself.) Police faced scrutiny by advocates and the press to improve their responses and to follow the laws exactly or be subjected to disciplinary action or lawsuits. The rise in the number of domestic violence arrests of women may be a result of this increased pressure to rectify past police inaction. Components of the Study In order to most fully explore the arrests of women on domestic violence charges and what happened to these women following arrest, I needed to hear from the arrested women, as well as explore the perceptions and experiences of people directly involved with this phenomenon, namely, the police and the female offender treatment providers. Thus, there were several stages of data collection for the project. The gathering of information was triangulated (Denzin and Lincoln 1994; Denzin 1997), using in-depth interviews, ridealong studies, and participant observation in the field. For those less familiar with the methodological term of triangulation, this means that data are collected and analyzed from three sources to better ensure reliability and validity of the findings.1 The ride-along study entailed a member of the research team accompanying police officers on their daily shifts in their neighborhoods, and observing and recording their actions and comments. Ten advanced undergraduate students and one graduate student were trained to conduct the ride-alongs, a process that is further described in greater detail in chapter 4. In order to maximize the possibility that the police would be dispatched to respond to a domestic violence call for help, ride-along shifts were selected to overrepresent evening and weekend shifts. During each ride-along, researchers queried police officers about their perceptions and experiences with women and domestic violence. The ride-along component covered the entire state. County A is what I refer to as the northern part of the state, and it is the largest and most populated county. It was over-sampled because it experienced much larger domestic violence caseloads and had more criminal justice The Research Project 39 professionals and resources devoted to responding to domestic violence. I refer to the other two counties, County B and County C, as the...