Women and policing in the South Pacific: a pathway towards gender-inclusive organizational reform

ABSTRACT

Scholars have been critical of the gender-biased nature of policing, and its effects on service delivery. They highlight how law enforcement is male-dominated, and how this impacts negatively on women as offenders and victims of crime. Such criticisms have mobilised international and national institutional support for more gender equitable representation in policing agencies. A growing body of research has addressed the impact of increasing the numbers of women police, and how this might lead to more sympathetic and less gender prejudicial policing. This paper reports on a study commissioned by the Tuvalu Police Service that explored public perceptions of service delivery. Our analysis spotlights perceptions about women in policing, attitudes in relation to preferred officer-gender in calls for service and views on increasing the number of women employed as police. The findings identified clear support for increasing the number of women police, but ambiguous sentiments in relation to the types of roles female officers could perform. Closer analysis of qualitative data, however, revealed an appreciation of the strengths of women police who, in a context characterised by regulatory pluralism, were able to address the needs of female victims and offenders in ways that male officers could not.

KEYWORDS:

• Pacific policing
• women in policing
• gender orientations
• gender inclusivity
• Tuvalu

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the The University of the South Pacific SRT Funding [Funding Contract for Strategic Research Theme Proj].

Notes on contributors

Melissa Bull

Melissa Bull is a Professor in the School of Justice and the Director of the QUT Centre for Justice, in Faculty of Law, Queensland University of Technology, Australia. Her expertise lies in the field of crime control and governance, with a focus on comparative criminology and policing in differently organised states.

Danielle Watson

Danielle Watson is Senior Lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia. She conducts research on police/civilian relations on the margins with particular interests in hotspot policing, police recruitment and training as well as many other areas specific to policing in developing country contexts. She is the principal researcher on two ongoing projects ‘Policing Pacific Island Communities’ and ‘Re-Imagining Graduate Supervision at Regional Universities’. In 2018 she published Pivot Police and the Policed: Language and Power Relations on the Margins of the Global South (Palgrave Macmillan).

Sara N. Amin

Sara N. Amin is Senior Lecturer and Discipline Coordinator of Sociology at the University of the South. Her research focuses on the areas of migration; identity politics, violence and security; gender relations; and education. Currently she has two ongoing projects: Religion and Policing in the Pacific and Changing Gender Relations in the Family in South Asia.

Kerry Carrington

Kerry Carrington is the Head of the School of Justice in the Faculty of Law at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. She is currently conducting a world first study on women’s police stations, is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences Australia for outstanding and distinguished contributions to the social sciences and recipient of a number of awards from the American Society of Criminology - Lifetime Achievement award (Division of Critical Criminology), and Distinguished Scholar Award (Division of Women and Crime). Kerry is a co-author of Southern Criminology (2019) Feminism and Global Justice (2015) and over 100 other publications, as well as the Founding Chief Editor of the International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy.