“Can I have a look?”: The discursive management of victims’ personal space during police first response call-outs to domestic abuse incidents

Steel, Kate

Abstract

The complexities of domestic abuse as both a lived experience and a crime generate unique communicative challenges at the scene of emergency police call-outs. Space is a prominent and complex feature of these ecounters, entailing a juxtaposition of the institutional and the private, whereby frontline officers seek evidence of abuse from victims in the same space in which the abuse occurred. This paper explores how speakers manage one evidentially salient aspect of these encounters: officers’ advancement into victim’s immediate personal space to inspect and photograph their injuries. As compared with the attention dedicated to preserving vulnerable victims’ personal ‘bubble’ of space in formal investigative interviews, first response guidelines allow participants more leeway to adapt their behaviour according to the unpredictable demands of each situation. I present two case studies here which form part of a wider study of first response call-outs to domestic abuse incidents reported to a UK police force. The audio data have been extracted from police body-worn video footage and transcribed, with visual information represented intralinearly. Through conversation analysis, I examine the microinteractional means by which personal space is made relevant and consequential to the unfolding talk, with a focus on how ownership rights and control over the space are (re)constructed discursively. Analysis demonstrates that entering victims’ personal space can be managed in ways that either reinforce their disempowered position or afford them some control. The findings have implications in relation to victims’ potential vulnerability, police-victim relations and the nature of the evidence produced.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Aug 29, 2023
• Online Publication Date: Oct 10, 2023
• Publication Date: Mar 1, 2024
• Deposit Date: Oct 2, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Oct 11, 2023
• Journal: International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique
• Print ISSN: 0952-8059
• Electronic ISSN: 1572-8722
• Publisher: Springer Verlag
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 37
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 547-572
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-023-10050-x
• Keywords: Embodied participation, Interactional space, Conversation analysis, Police, First response, Domestic abuse
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/11148265