Intimate Partner Violence Myths in Police Reports: A Directed Content Analysis

Background: Although much has changed in social and criminal justice system responses to intimate partner violence (IPV) since public awareness campaigns from the 1970s, stigmatization around IPV offense and victimization remains. In many cases, efforts to eliminate IPV may be hindered by the existence of IPV myths and the ways in which these myths perpetuate victim blaming. Unfortunately, stigma can be spread by mythology about the crime, its offenders, victims, and the overarching gender norms. Since IPV cases are managed under the auspices of the criminal justice system, the manner in which the system perpetuates IPV myths is worthy of attention.

Literature suggests that police officers may be vulnerable to IPV mythology in their decision-making and reporting of IPV calls (Gover, Pudrzynska, & Dodge, 2011). This is troubling for IPV victims and offenders alike, since police reports follow them through the criminal justice system and intervention programs. Guided by four IPV myths identified in Eigenberg, Kappeler & McGuffee’s study (2012), the purpose of this study is to explore how the presence of IPV myths in police reports influence the responding officers’ interactions, decision and intervention with victims and alleged offenders.

Method:  This qualitative study examined the use of IPV mythology within the IPV police reports of 17 police departments in one metropolitan area of the southwestern U.S. The authors analyzed 58 police reports using directed content analysis (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005), and codified this content into qualitative themes. 58 casefiles of male and female offenders were sampled and scanned for legibility with an equal number of male (N=29) and female offenders (N=29). The files were disassembled, copied, and uploaded to atlas.ti software for data analysis.

Findings: Results indicate that IPV myths do influence police reporting, and the use of IPV mythology appears to be associated with a lack of awareness about coercive control in IPV. Findings reveal that police drew upon IPV myths by 1) regularly typifying females as hysterical, 2) emphasizing injury, and the balance of injury between parties, to determine who is the offender, and 3) minimizing the coercive control exercised between parties to, instead, quickly determine “who started it.” These subthemes were organized under the meta-theme undetected coercive control.  

Conclusion: Examining the existence and etiology of IPV myths within the criminal justice system is important for police departments, social workers, researchers. To our knowledge, this study is the first of its kind to examine the existence of IPV mythology within police reports. This study’s results have implications for social workers, in that IPV advocates working in the Victim Services within police departments can be change agents to reduce the influence of IPV myths on law enforcements. Social workers should be proactive in raising awareness about sophisticated and hidden forms of IPV.

Implications on improvement in police training were also suggested. Social workers and police forces could experiment with training officers about the existence of coercive control within IPV as a proxy target that could influence the rates with which police officers ascribe to IPV mythology.