Doctoral Dissertation Research: Governing Domestic Violence: Investigating the Effects of Arrest and Prosecution Practice on the Intimate Violence of Masculine Subjects

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

This research will study the effects of mandatory arrest and no-drop prosecution policies on domestic batterers. The objective of this study is to understand how the practices comprising arrest and prosecution shape perpetrators' understanding and performance of abuse. Past research has approached this topic exclusively from a deterrence perspective, employing experimental and quasi-experimental designs to test whether arrest and/or prosecution predict less reports of future violence than other types of interventions. Drawing from completed fieldwork which has found that police officers and defense attorneys minimize and justify abuse in order to make domestic battery suspects easier to work with, this research explores four hypotheses: (1) batterers' understanding of abuse is not changed by arrest and prosecution; (2) the practices employed by police officers and defense attorneys reinforce perpetrators' understanding of abuse; (3) batterers perceive arrest and prosecution as challenges to their masculinity; and (4) men will turn to new coercive tactics following arrest and prosecution in order to reassert their masculinity. These hypotheses will be investigated through semi-structured interviews with 30 misdemeanor domestic battery suspects.