The experience of interactional justice for victims of ‘honour’-based violence and abuse reporting to the police in England and Wales

Abstract

Interactional justice is concerned with how far victims feel (i) respected by justice officials ('interpersonal justice') and (ii) informed about the progress of their case and the justice process overall ('informational justice') [Laxminarayan, M., Henrichs, J., and Pemberton, A. (2012). Procedural and interactional justice: a comparative study of victims in the Netherlands and New South Wales. European journal of criminology, 9 (3), 260-275;Laxminarayan, M. (2013). Interactional justice, coping and the legal system: needs of vulnerable victims. International review of victimology, 19 (2), [145][146][147][148][149][150][151][152][153][154][155][156][157][158]. This paper explores the experience of interactional justice for victims of 'honour'-based violence and abuse (HBVA) who report to the police in England and Wales. HBVA refers to abuse perpetrated with reference to ideas of 'shame' and 'honour'. Semistructured interviews were carried out with 36 victims of HBVA across England. This paper documents their experience and extends the framework of interactional justice proposed by Laxminarayan et al. (2012). First, we identify intersectionality, in particular, the positions of gender, ethnicity and immigration status within the victim-officer encounter, as central to interpreting the interpersonal experiences of HBVA victims with police. Second, we find that how information is used and delivered can be as important as the content and timeliness of communication. Twenty of our sample of 36 participants were happy with the initial police response, but only 9 were happy with their reporting experience overall. We argue that focusing on HBVA victims' interaction with justice actors could enable us to understand and improve HBVA victims' experience of, and satisfaction with, the justice system overall.ARTICLE HISTORY

Perception and barriers: reporting female genital mutilation

“…We explore the extent to which both are impacted by women's positionality as first-generation immigrant women, and the intersections of race, faith and inequality. The paper draws on data from research conducted by Hester et al (2015) to identify and interview victims of honour-based violence, and included forced marriage and other forms of honour-based violence, including domestic and sexual abuse committed in the name of honour (see Mulvihill et al, 2018). This paper focusses on the UK resident victims-survivors of FGM, which we believe is a group that has received less attention than forced marriage and domestic violence-related HBV in the criminology, social policy and gender-based violence literature in the UK.…”

Shaping Priority Services for UK Victims of Honour‐Based Violence/Abuse, Forced Marriage, and Female Genital Mutilation

“…; Mulvihill et al . ). However, there is much less focus on the point at which support can, or should, be withdrawn.…”

“…The definition of case closure depends, to a large extent, on the nature of the victim's disclosure and the support she is offered and/or accepts (Mulvihill et al . ). In the most positive instances of victim‐police contact identified in our sample, the victim received exceptional aftercare, maintaining long‐term occasional contact with, and at the professional discretion of, her dedicated officers.…”

“…One source of that challenge rests on the activities of grass‐roots activists and community‐based support groups that have played a leading role in driving the development of new and specific legal provisions for victims of HBV/A, FM, and FGM (for an overview, see, Gangoli et al . ; Graca ; Mulivill, Gangoli and Hester ; Sanders‐McDonagh and Neville ), in particular. Indeed, it was a freedom of information request made by one of these activist groups – the London‐based Iranian and Kurdish Women's Rights Organisation (IKWRO) – that prompted publication of the first set of national HBV/A statistics, which revealed that more than 11,000 HBV/A incidents had been reported to the UK police between 2010 and 2014 (Iranian and Kurdish Women's Rights Organisation (IKWRO) ).…”

“…; Gill, Begikhani and Hague ; Mulvihill et al . ), the emergence of new professional practice in response to HBV/A (Local Government Association ; Payton ; Safe Lives ), and the key issues of racism, discrimination, and cultural misunderstanding in this field (Korteweg ; Mirza ; Razack ). However, to date, few studies have asked how these approaches might be coalesced in wider efforts to develop, or reduce barriers to accessing, services for a group now formally included among VCOP's ‘priority victims’.…”