Doing masculinity in narratives about reporting violent crime: young male victims talk about contacting and encountering the police

Abstract

Reporting criminal victimization to the police is no obvious act. The decision to file a complaint varies depending on the specific situation. This article discusses 10 young Swedish men's narratives about contacting the police when mugged or assaulted. Although all of them have contacted the police it has not been self-obvious. Rather, they present reasons for not filing a complaint. However, after persuasion and careful consideration they decided that contacting the police is ‘the right thing to do’. This article discusses how the young men by use of their narratives about reporting crime present identities where victim worthiness is balanced against hegemonic masculinity norms.

Keywords:

• victim
• masculinity
• reporting crime
• police
• identity

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Nordisk Forskerutdanningsakademi (now NordForsk) for financial support during my research. For valuable comments on my text, I would like to thank Annette Hill, Malin Åkerström, Fredrik Sivertsson, Christoffer Carlsson and the anonymous reviewers.

Notes

1. This study focuses on young men, but I do not reduce masculine traits to one biological sex: both men and women can perform masculinity (cf Messerschmidt 2004).

2. Utsatt för brott? [Victim of crime?] 2001, p. 5, my translation.

3. It is also important to note that ethnic minorities may be reluctant to report crimes to the police because of distrust and perceived discrimination. A new research project (Burcar et al. unpublished data) indicates how young people with an immigrant background renounce reporting because of previous negative experiences with the police (see also Sigler and Johnson 2002).

4. Therefore, it is not surprising that studies on young men as offenders are more common than studies about young men as crime victims.

5. In another study, Riessman discusses how childless women in India narratively defy stigma (Riessman 2000).

6. It is possible that my question ‘Why not?’ is seen as a reproach, as if I believe that contacting the police when victimized is the natural and proper thing to do. Maybe that is why Lucas says that possibly he would have done so later on (‘afterwards you probably would have done so but not then’).

7. To ‘go home and rinse the blood off’ can have both a literal and a figurative meaning: to physically wash away the blood but also to ‘wash away’ what happened.

8. These positive narratives are very short, and it seems that the young men do not find any reason to develop them further.

9. Another young man in the study, Eddy, who was hit in the face with a glass bottle, uses the same expression when talking about the time it took for the ambulance to arrive: ‘I guess they had to finish their coffee first (laughs).’ In a study by Lindgren (1999, p. 62), there are examples of how critique is directed toward prosecutors for not being present during pauses at trial (and therefore not being able to answer the plaintiffs’ questions). One young man in Lindgren's study, who was mugged, talks about the prosecutor: ‘She ran away and drank coffee.’