Policing normalcy: sexual violence against women offenders with disability

Abstract

This article explores police responses to sexual violence reported by women offenders designated as having cognitive and psychosocial disabilities. The article does so by reference to the critical disability studies analytical approach to disability as socially constructed ‘abnormality’. This article utilizes this approach in analysing the recorded police contacts of one woman offender designated as disabled, ‘Jane’. Jane has had multiple contacts with police over a period of 15 years as a victim of sexual violence, alleged offender and ‘mentally ill’ person. The article finds that through multiple contacts with police as victim, alleged offender and ‘mentally ill’ person, the police events records build a narrative of Jane as an ‘abnormal’ body who is reduced to a drain on police and public health resources, a dishonest and nuisance offender and an attention seeker. The article argues that it is the interlocking discourses of gender, disability and criminality that produce Jane as unworthy of victim status and, perversely, in need of punishment by the criminal justice system for her public displays of trauma, mental distress and requests for police assistance. Ultimately, the article concludes that we need to give greater attention to the relationship between disability and affect, and to the broader cultural, institutional, legal and economic discourses that shape individuals’ affective responses, in understanding police responses to violence against women offenders designated as disabled and in contesting these women’s status as ‘ungrievable’ victims of violence.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Olivia Todhunter and Julian Trofimovs for their research assistance. Thank you to the feedback received on earlier drafts from Eileen Baldry, Felicity Bell and Leanne Dowse. Thank you to feedback on related papers received at the University of Wollongong Feminist Research Network Works in Progress event and at ‘Complicities’ Law, Literature and the Humanities Association of Australasia Conference.

Notes

1. Ethics approval was granted by the University of Wollongong Human Research Ethics Committee (HE14/168), and ratified by the University of New South Wales Human Research Ethics Committee.

2. This study is a nested study within the Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage project, ‘People with Mental Health Disorders and Cognitive Disabilities (MHDCD) in the Criminal Justice System (CJS) in NSW’, University of NSW – Chief Investigators Baldry, Dowse and Webster. Ethics approval was obtained from all of the relevant ethics bodies, including from the University of New South Wales Human Research Ethics Committee. See generally Australians with MHDCD in the CJS Project (2015) (29 June 2012) Mental Health Disorders and Cognitive Disabilities in the Criminal Justice System http://www.mhdcd.unsw.edu.au/australians-mhdcd-cjs-project.html. See also (Baldry, Dowse, and Clarence 2012).

3. The cohort was drawn from the 2001 NSW Inmate Health Survey (IHS) and from the NSW Department of Corrective Services State-wide Disability Service Database (SDD).