Drawing a line: boundary work in victim support police work

ABSTRACT

Victim support entails one of the most intense stress- and trauma-laden interactions faced by law enforcement professionals, and this function or role frequently triggers long-lasting negative effects on officers’ psychological health and wellbeing. As police officers interact daily with victims, but also with other officers, social services, and institutions, the limits between tasks and needs may directly affect how they manage stress, trauma, and notions of individual and organisational responsibility. As such, boundary work may be a useful framework to understand and even improve how victim support police officers interact with other individuals and organisations. Drawing from a ground-breaking qualitative, in-depth research with police officers that provide support to victims of gender-based and domestic violence, this paper analyses conscious and unconscious boundaries as key elements in the officers’ wellbeing. Informed by the empirical findings of a case study of Catalonia's Mossos d’Esquadra police corps, this paper explores how victim support officers negotiate their individual and organisational boundaries as they interact with other agents and institutions, and how these negotiations affect them. This paper argues for the relevance of an officer's agency and discretion for distinguishing between conscious and unconscious boundaries, as their limits may be blurred throughout the wide range of interactions.

KEYWORDS:

• Victim support
• burnout
• compassion fatigue
• boundary work

Acknowledgements

We want to acknowledge and appreciate the participant officers’ cooperation and willingness, as well as the PG-ME corps’ support and flexibility. We also want to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments, as they have greatly improved this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Drawing from our data management plans, interviews and focus groups are coded consecutively based on the police region. For instance, ‘IRP1_3’ refers to the third interview in the RP1 region, whereas ‘FGRP3_1’ refers to the first focus group in the RP3 region.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Government’s Ministry for Equality Pacto de Estado contra la Violencia de Género (2021) and requested by the Catalan Government's Institut de Seguretat Pública de Catalunya, Departament d'Interior, Generalitat de Catalunya, under the reference ISPC-2021-276.