“Not really much of a choice”: Frontline violence against women shelter workers’ perspectives on police intervention in intimate partner violence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As one of the key institutions responding to intimate partner violence (IPV), the police are often the first point of contact for women experiencing violence. While police involvement is intended to provide immediate relief and protection for survivors of violence, it can also produce unintended negative outcomes, particularly for systemically marginalized groups (Aujla, 2021; Duhaney, 2022; Garza et al., 2022; Wachholz & Miedema, 2000). Informed by anti-carceral feminism and transformative justice, this thesis sought to explore the effects of police intervention in IPV and its implications for social work practice through the perspectives of frontline violence against women (VAW) shelter workers. Four frontline VAW shelter workers from the Greater Toronto Area participated in the research to share their experiences working with the police. The findings illuminated (1) workers’ perspectives on IPV, and responses needed to address this issue, (2) the complexities of police intervention in IPV where workers shared what they felt was working and what was not, (3) the constraints on women’s choice and safety as a result of police intervention, and (4) workers’ call for more options to address IPV outside the criminal legal framework. As an exploratory study, this project contributes to a better understanding of the impact of a carceral response to IPV on both women who experience violence and frontline shelter workers who engage with the police in their practice. It also holds implications for anti-violence efforts in research, policy, and social work practice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".