Living in the Margins: Assessing Police Engagement as a Form of Victim Help-Seeking Through Legal Estrangement

ABSTRACT

This paper offers one attempt to move police reporting literature into help-seeking contexts. The current study uses the legal estrangement framework to examine complex victim help-seeking decisions, in the form of police engagement, for individuals living in impoverished neighborhoods with high violent crime rates in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. A thematic analysis was applied to semi-structured interviews and found help-seeking is a dynamic process. Among victims of color, the legal estrangement framework contextualizes the landscape of help-seeking decisions, while other socio-ecological and situational characteristics simultaneously influence help-seeking behaviors. Concepts of procedural injustice, vicarious marginalization, and structural exclusion are reflected in both help-seekers and non-help-seekers.

KEYWORDS:

• Help-seeking
• legal estrangement
• police interaction
• reporting
• victimization

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. See Roman et al. (2020) for complementary study on victim help-seeking and detailed methodology of SaSSah study.

2. A small number of participants discussed positive (10%) and neutral/mixed (5.1%) experiences with the police but did not noticeably contribute to differences in help-seeking classification.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) and Office for Victims of Crime (OVC), Department of Justice (DOJ) under Grant number [2016-V3-GX-0009].