Assessing Police and Protective Order Reports of Violence

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the amount of agreement between police and victims' reports of domestic violence. Data were examined from 77 couples in which the female member of the couple filed for a protective order and the couple had contact with the police about domestic violence. The hypothesis tested was that police and victim reports of physical violence would have some measure of agreement due to the serious nature of physical violence but that there would be little agreement for verbal violence or menacing behavior. Victims reported significantly more physical violence than police; however, there was a significant correlation between victims' reports of physical violence and police reports. These results suggest that although there is some relation between victim and police physical violence reports, victims perceived more violence had occurred than police reported.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Arias, H. , & Beach, S. (1987). Validity of self-reports of marital violence. Journal of Family Violence, 2, 139-149.

Berk, R. , Rauma, D. , Loseke, D. , & Berk, S. (1982). Throwing the cops back out: The decline of a local program to make the criminal justice system more responsive to incidents of domestic violence. Social Science Research, 11, 245-279.

Heyman, R. , & Schlee, K. (1997). Toward a better estimate of the prevalence of partner abuse: Adjusting rates based on the sensitivity of the Conflict Tactics Scale. Journal of Family Psychology, 11, 332-338.

Holtzworth-Munroe, A. (1988). Causal attributions in marital violence: Theoretical and methodological issues. Clinical Psychology Review, 8, 331-344.

Home, A. (1994). Attributing responsibility and assessing gravity in wife abuse situations: A comparative study of police and social workers. Journal of Social Service Research, 19, 67-84.

Johnson, H. (1998). Rethinking survey research on violence against women. In R. E. Dobash & R. P. Dobash (Eds.), Rethinking violence against women (pp. 23-51). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Levens, R. , & Dautton, D. (1998). The social service role of the police: Domestic crisis intervention. Ottawa: Solicitor General of Canada.

Schwarz, N. (1999). Self-reports. American Psychologist, 54, 93-105.

Stewart, A. , & Maddren, K. (1997). Police officers' judgments of blame in family violence: The impact of gender and alcohol. Sex Roles, 37, 921-933.

10.

Straus, M. (1979). Measuring intrafamily conflict and violence: The Conflict Tactics Scale. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 41, 75-88.

11.

Walker, L. (1998). Domestic violence. In T. Miller & L. Veltkamp (Eds.), Clinical handbook of adult exploitation and abuse (pp. 77-85). Madison, CT: International Universities Press.