Miss Brooke Jordan1
1University of New South Wales, Australia
Biography:
Brooke Jordan is a PhD Candidate and Casual Academic at UNSW researching gender and power in domestic violence through feminist theory and post-structuralist philosophy.
Abstract:
This paper analyses power relations central to policing domestic violence in order to understand the present reality and future possibilities of police response. This is particularly relevant for Australia, the fourth country to adopt the criminalisation of coercive control in 2024. Adopting this strategy for policing domestic violence has not gone without criticism. Researchers and activists alike raise concerns based on Australia’s well-documented pattern of police mis-handling domestic violence cases, including not taking reports of violence seriously, mis-identifying victims of violence – particularly Indigenous women – as perpetrators, and often failing to fulfil basic police duties. As a result, women looking for help are instead often punished, dismissed, or ignored, sometimes with fatal consequences. In this context, Professor Kerry Carrington has advocated for Australia to learn from a drastically different approach, the Women Led Police Stations in Argentina. These specialist stations are designed to respond and prevent gender violence.
Analysing the methods and practices of these two different approaches reveals the complexity of gendered and racial power relations in policing domestic violence. This paper argues that the gendered and racial hierarchies animating domestic violence are not separate from the ways this violence is policed. Specifically, the power relations at play in domestic violence can be reinforced, supported, or transformed by the ways it is policed, specifically policing structures and on-the-ground responses. This paper thus contributes to the literature on WLPS and its relevancy for Australian interventions into domestic violence, and more general scholarship on gender and power in domestic violence.