Between Normality and Deviance: The Breakdown of Batterers' Identity Following Police Intervention

• NCJ Number: 223121
• Journal: Journal of Interpersonal Violence Volume: 19 Issue: 4 Dated: April 2004 Pages: 443-467
• Author(s): Eli Buchbinder; Zvi Eisikovits
• Date Published: April 2004
• Length: 25 pages
• Publication Format: Article
• Publication Type: Report (Study/Research)
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This Israeli study examined how men who battered their intimate partners perceived, interpreted, and reconstructed their experiences with police over time, how they were affected on a personal and interpersonal level, and how they evaluated these police interventions.

Abstract

Findings revealed a continuum of self-management, ranging from attempts to preserve a normative identity in the first encounter to struggling against criminalization in the second encounter and adopting a victim identity in the third encounter. The analysis of men’s subsequent encounters with police revealed a pattern of escalation in their perception of police, with increasing feelings of isolation and the perception of an emerging alliance between their partners and the police against them. The findings were discussed in the context of gender identity and power relations. Two parallel processes emerged, the first related to men’s awareness that police have many doubts concerning the level of intervention employed in domestic violence cases; the second a process of escalation in the relationship and assumptions of a siege mentality. This study notes that with the transformation of intimate violence from private trouble to social problem, police intervention in domestic violence cases has become more prevalent; however, prior research has focused mainly on battered women’s perception of police intervention, their evaluations, and their level of satisfaction with the intervention. Citing the dearth of research examining the perpetrators’ subjective perceptions of such interventions, this study sought to describe and analyze battering men’s perceptions of police intervention and was based on semistructured, indepth interviews with 20 batterers who had repeated encounters with police. Data were also collected from 1,000 domestic violence police files regarding various police interventions and from interviews with 400 police officers in Israel. Table, references