Book Review: Policing and Media: Public Relations, Simulations and Communications, Murray Lee and Alyce McGovern, Routledge, 2014

In February 2014 the UK’s Channel 4 showed a 95 minute long pilot episode of Babylon.  As is common in TV dramas now, it was multi-stranded with an ensemble cast.  A central strand of that episode was, as Channel 4’s website says:

London's police force is in need of a public image revamp. And Chief Constable Richard Miller, played by James Nesbitt, has found just the woman to do it… American visionary from the world of new media, Liz Garvey, played by Brit Marling, sets out to revolutionise the force's PR department just as an outbreak of violence erupts.

This squarely addresses the issues raised in Lee and McGovern’s book.  The interplay between media (new and old) and policing, the significance of the trans Atlantic (indeed global) and the depiction of that in the media.  As they assert, ‘Policing in the twenty-first century is nothing if not hyperreal (p6).

They open their book with a long quote from Kym Charlton’s final post on the Queensland Police Service Facebook page as she stood down as Director of Police Media.  She invokes the continued relevance of ‘Peelian Principles’ but also the new media landscape in which they had 363,500 ‘likes’ (476,000 as of 2 June 2014).  They must have started earlier than the Metropolitan Police who only have 28,187 from a larger potential population.  The NYPD have garnered 237,000 since February 2012 when they joined Facebook.

The use of the quote from Charlton is very appropriate as Lee and McGovern meditate upon, much that she has to say.  All of which is made relevant to non-Australian readers; as they cite international experts such as Mawby, Reiner and Surette.  Their extensive research is Australian but they always relate it to the wider policing and media worlds.  There is, however, a sense in which the research came first, leading to the many conference presentations and journal articles that are a basis for the book.

The hyperreal affords no time to catch up.  Clearly, as they were writing this, events in the UK took a very public, and ongoing, turn with Lord Justice Leveson’s Inquiry into ‘the culture, practices and ethics of the press and, in particular, the relationship of the press with the public, police and politicians’. Lord Justice Leveson opened the hearings on 14 November 2011, saying: “The press provides an essential check on all aspects of public life. That is why any failure within the media affects all of us. At the heart of this Inquiry, therefore, may be one simple question: who guards the guardians?”

The ‘guardian’ quote is well known to police scholars but here Leveson suggests that the press are the guards of police and politicians and vice versa in creative tension.  However, his Inquiry and subsequent events suggest a more collusive tension.  The more narrowly focussed Inquiry by Elizabeth Filkin found, ‘there were a range of problems in the relationship between the MPS and the media and much needs to be done to make the necessary improvements. I am delighted to hear that the MPS is signed up to them.”

All of these developments are covered by Lee and McGovern but since then Operations Elveden (alleged payments by journalists to police and others) Weeting (phone hacking) and Tuleta (computer hacking and other privacy breaches) have rumbled into action (arrests listed here).  Moreover, allegations of undercover police spying on green groups and the family of Stephen Lawrence, Plebgate and the riots after the shooting of Mark Duggan have all perturbed the nation and any easy relationship between media and police.  The authors cannot have foreseen these events and some of their Australian examples have resonances.  The hyperreal vortex means few of us can keep up across time zones.  As they conclude, ‘In five years time […] this analysis, like the newspaper still rolled up on the coffee table, may also be old news’ (p213).

What we might cling to in all of this is theory.  The core is their synthesis of Garland’s Cultures of Control, De Certeau’s observations on everyday life and O’Malley’s thoughts on ‘simulated justice’.  That is, ‘a simulated form of policing that we believe has grown in chorus and which complements the simulated processes and strategies outlined by O’Malley’ (p71) but operating in a cultural realm unexplored by him.  They make three points from this.  First, they recognise the importance of the image of police even from Peel’s time but now claim, ‘the representation of policing is policing - or at least a simulation or simulacra of traditional policing’ (p72, emphasis in original).  Secondly, ‘simulated policing is more than than a cynical attempt at spin produced by increasingly professional and savvy public relations units’ (p72).  That is these units and staff largely believe in it.  Thirdly, and squarely with O’Malley, they suggest this simulated policing has ‘potentially unlimited public reach’ (p73).  That is whilst there is research on police/public interaction and satisfaction etc virtual/simulated interactions have yet to be adequately researched.  This ‘simulation’ occurs in Mathiesen’s synoptic ‘viewer society’.

The book is organised around three sections.  The first section of three chapters runs through the police and media literature, practice and introducing ‘simulated policing’.  The second section examines this form of policing through chapters on the press release, social media and reality TV.  All of those may fail as ‘policing’ and examples are given but the final section of two chapters on ‘policing the police’ examines active resistance to police and policing through new and old media.  Clearly some fails and resistance overlap or feed into and upon each other.  Much resistance is seen to be a tactic of the weak in De Certeau’s terms.  The final conclusion opens with the Boston Marathon bombing and the use made by the police, and others, of new media - often as a source for, or corrective to, old media.  There is also an appendix on research methods showing the breadth and depth of their qualitative and quantitative engagement.  Methods are not for everyone, but more might have been made of this.  The publisher might be behind such a decision to downplay this aspect.

Some of the problems of the book are caused by attempting to cover different forces on different continents with different media ecologies.  However, that is also the source of its strengths.  But a few points need to be made.  They note, ‘Today Scotland Yard employs ex News Corporation staff to manage their media profile’ (p61).  Already this news is old, indeed turned out to be part of the problem, as in March 2102 the Met's PR chief Dick Fedorcio resigned over his employment of such staff.  He was replaced by a Channel 4 TV News editor.

They rightly note the sousveillance of police by ‘citizen journalists’ and activists (from Rodney King to Ian Tomlinson) but don’t cover the growth of police use of body cameras.  They quote Greer and McLaughin on a couple of issues but not on the hounding of Sir Ian Blair from office of Met Commissioner by the media.

The emphasis on both factual and fictional coverage of policing aligns them with the work of Leishman and Mason on ‘faction’ which this book usefully updates.  They mention the significance of a number of Australian crime/police shows (Wildside, Blue Heelers and Water Rats), The Wire and the UK’s The Bill.  These are largely treated unproblematically but Anita Lam’s Making Crime Television now offers a more nuanced insider view as she worked ethnographically within some Canadian crime series.  Recently published is Marianne Colbran’s Media Representations of Police and Crime which promises further insights as she was a script writer on The Bill for many years before becoming a criminologist.

So this is a developing area of interest.  It would be interesting, but difficult, to hear other voices/see other representations from around the world.  For instance, is ‘simulated policing’ occurring in Pakistan, Brazil, Russia or Ukraine?  Has it even occurred consistently in Great Britain?  Might some discussion/conclusions be less postmodern outside the global North or where policing has remained more ‘hands on’, for instance Northern Ireland.

Criminologists and policing experts should not be put off by terms like ‘public relations’ or ‘media’ in the title; this book is clearly about policing and a worthy addition to Critical Criminology.  Practitioners of the ‘dark arts’ might enjoy some of the detail.

This review was commissioned by Rutgers Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books website but they rejected it for being too British and having links! 

Nic Groombridge, ‘Public Criminologist’ and ‘Master of Truth’

Twitter tells me that for the week of 15 November 2014 my tweets received 3,809 views and that I had 55 new followers with 74 visits to links that I had posted. My most popular tweet that week accounted for one third of those link visits; with one in ten of those viewing visiting the link to an article in Radical Criminology.  This is the text of the tweet:

Slagged off by Nicolas Carrier in @critcrimjournal.radicalcriminology.org/index.php/rc/a… with other public criminologists @ProfDavidWilson @martina0074

So Nicolas’s article received 25 more views than it might have.  In addition to my tweet I also emailed Nicolas as follows:

Hi Nicolas
some good points in your sound thrashing of us deluded public criminologists
Not sure Loader and Sparks would see as being on same team as them.
In addition to my academic work you critique I tweet and blog.
Long shot but do you fancy boiling down your argument for the public - 1000 words?- and I'll put it on my blog and tweet the link?
I've already facebooked and tweeted link to your radical crim article
regards

Obviously a bit cheeky of me but this is his reply:

Hello Nic,
Happy to read that this piece of mine gave you some pleasure and, perhaps, food for thought.
Thanks for adding the link to your social media posts – the ‘public’ can access my argument if it so desires, but the audience targeted is composed of social scientists like you.
Cheers

I have alerted some of the other academics quoted about the article so they can make their own responses.  These are mine and will concentrate on how my work is seen by Carrier.  I believe he has misunderstood some things but his email suggests too that however radical his intention he is as elitist as those he criticises.

Carrier’s title is, ‘On Some Limits and Paradoxes of Academic Orations on Public Criminology’. Cultural differences may be at work but I’ve never claimed to be a social scientist and ‘academic oration’ is too hifalutin to describe any of my writing.  And, as I suggest in my email, I’m not sure Loader and Sparks see me as an equal to their theorising as I rate only one mention in their book, Public Criminology?.  

Here’s my review of their book in Punishment and Society in which I concluded:

This is a high-minded book – with the occasional dig (e.g. at Carol Smart for leaving criminology and the harm perspective for disciplinary fuzziness). It is well written and a useful tour de horizon, but the authors’ long labour has not produced an elephant. Their eclectic take on criminology is useful but the narrowness of their concept of ‘public’ is not. Far more attention to both old and new media is needed for a full discussion of ‘public criminology’.

and more critically in mid flow (and channeling Sterne’s Tristram Shandy) I opine:

The book is said to offer ‘an original and provocative account of the condition

of, and prospects for, criminology’. That is, they present ‘the Life and Opinions on

Criminology, an academic discipline’ and spend so long on its conception, gestation,

stormy adolescence and middle-aged spread that whether and how to do ‘public

criminology’ is scarcely addressed.

Carrier is influenced strongly by Vincenzo Ruggiero’s ‘How public is public criminology’ in Crime Media Culture.  For instance:

But how can public criminologists act as citizens in a participatory democracy

and as professional social scientists simultaneously?

I surmise that Carrier sees ‘public criminologists’ as the elitists, following Ruggiero’s contention that:

Something esoteric and elitist still remains in the description of ‘public criminology’ provided above, in that experts working in academia seem to seek the help of experts working in adjacent areas and, while begging for their benevolence, try to improve the lives of others, namely non-expert actors.

Carrier’s judgement of my work stems purely from my published oeuvre 'I'm Making a TV Programme Here!': Reality TV's Banged Up and Public Criminology with David Wilson and Criminologists Say … : An Analysis of UK National Press Coverage of Criminology and Criminologists and a Contribution to the Debate on ‘Public Criminology’ when he, like Loader and Sparks, overlooks social and popular media.

Ruggiero’s position is that criminology isn’t sociological or political enough.  As he was the External Examiner of my political and sociological PhD it is disappointing that I don’t even rate a mention in his article.  It would be nice to think that this was deliberate as I don’t fit his argument so well but guess it just a failure to search beyond the usual suspects.  I am more disappointed by Paul Rock’s survey, ’The public faces of public criminology’ failure to mention me as I’d emailed him the details after hearing the talk upon which the article is based.  So now I’m making my private humiliation public.

Anyone who knows me or who follows me on Twitter or even Facebook will find my inclusion in this list of ‘cookbook’ writers risible:

Similarly, Fichtelberg and Kupchik (2011:61) see criminologists as “experts with a unique contribution to make to debates on criminal justice policy”, and believe that public criminology shall “enhance the credibility” of the ‘discipline’. It is from this general perspective of criminology as the master of truth on crime and punishment that public criminology cookbooks are usually published (e.g. Rowe, 2012; Wilson and Groombridge, 2010; Feilzer, 2009; Groombridge, 2007).

Having worked for the Home Office nearly 18 years before becoming a criminologist means that I know (standpoint epistemology) how little attention is paid to criminologists  or other experts - so praise to the undercover ‘public’ criminology of David Faulkner.

I’ve written no cookbook, claim no mastery.  Indeed in my work point out that everyone has a democratic right to talk about crime.  I’ll use humour, vitriol, irony (see title of this blog) even peer-reviewed work but increasingly tweets and blogs to start a debate.

And here I have to liken myself to Foucault (who Carrier consigns at the concluding moment to a footnote) in stating clearly that I have no, ‘desire to lay down the law for others and to try “to mold the political will of others”.

Not proof I know but hope that Carrier and Ruggiero might consider this tweet from today. as evidence of my masterly radicalism.

But whilst I see my ‘public criminology’ as an extension of my teaching, and here I offer Carrier a better stick with which to beat me, recognise that actually I practice ‘publicity criminology’.

Cereal Killers: The need for an agri-cultural criminology

I've asked Chris Sambrook of Harper Adams to talk a bit about Rural Criminology.  I know as a green criminologist that there is an uncomfortable overlap; crimes by and against farmers don't sit neatly in a nice pristine offender/victim matrix.  It's more than the theft of machinery, animal cruelty or 'get of my land'. Cue the Archers theme tune.

Rural crime has found a new voice, or rather it has found a voice that previously saw it as little more than a convenient column filler. Rural journalism has long treated machinery theft, hare coursing, poaching and the other crimes spread across their rural crime palette as a reportable irritant rather than a core issue. But not anymore. Rural crime is now making the front pages, both of the specialist press dealing in agricultural and countryside matters and of local newspapers with a rural leaning. In fact we might be tempted to say that it has found two new voices, for this reporting often carries a police quote and details of the latest constabulary initiative to tackle the problem. It seems then that the police have also discovered rural crime. 

Of course as a rural criminologist I am scarcely going to complain about my subject being thrust into public consciousness. Indeed this coverage is most welcome, for at a time when overall crime incident is falling rural crime has seen a considerable upsurge. But it makes me wonder, why the sudden interest?

The truth is it is not sudden for to misquote Eddie Cantor it has taken rural crime many years to become an overnight success. There are probably many factors at play here, but might I suggest that greater public access to the setting of police priorities and the need to placate the demands of an influential rural electorate, both consequential to the introduction of Police and Crime Commissioners, has been highly influential.

That said this new found interest causes me some concern, not least because it presents an extraordinarily narrow view of crime in the rural setting. Whilst the media coverage may have grown exponentially in volume we do not see any corresponding growth in breadth. Moreover, and perhaps of greater concern, this constrained view bears a remarkable similarity to the widely held police notion of what constitutes ‘rural crime’. 

This shared discourse is potentially misleading for it takes no account of emerging rural crime or the uniqueness of widely occurring crimes when they happen in the rural setting. It is these issues that are at the core of much of the research being carried out by criminologists within the Centre for Rural Security at Harper Adams University. Take, for example, my own research into the emergence of counterfeit pesticides within the UK agricultural market. It is a crime with known links to transnational organised crime groups and with the potential to cause serious environmental and human health problems as well as its economic impact. And yet this, and similar non-traditional rural crimes, rarely make the local policing agenda.

Rural crime is growing, and as importantly it is changing. However, it seems that the way it is perceived and communicated is not. Perhaps then the time is right for an agri-cultural criminology, time for us to consider what has shaped this mediated notion of crime in the rural setting.

Radical, humanist and pessimistic ‘So What’ criminologies.

I plead guilty to most of these charges and more.  Worse still I’m not even that radical, just grumpy.  As an ex Home Office civil servant I’m extremely aware of how difficult it is to influence policy (are you listening REF assessors?); and with my radical hat on generally not sought to - other than wishing some notice had been taken of my early assessment of CCTV.  

I got started in criminology after reading  Jock Young’s ‘Working Class Criminology’ when on an Open University course.  I subsequently took my MA in Criminology at Middlesex where I was taught by Jock, John Lea and Roger Matthews.  Whilst my own output since has been esoteric (so what?) I see it as underpinned by some realism even whilst entertaining ontological doubts.

A rather more echt realism can be found in Roger Matthews latest book.  I asked him to write a few words about it.

REALIST CRIMINOLOGY   - PALGRAVE MACMILLAN (July 2014)

Roger Matthews

The purpose of this book is to provide a response to the paradox that as the criminological enterprise has expanded exponentially in recent years its policy relevance has decreased. In fact, some commentators have argued that a great deal of criminology is in policy terms irrelevant and have called for a more ‘public criminology’. The explanation for the decreasing policy relevance presented in the book is that an increasing body of criminological endeavour is centred around two camps. On one side there has been a growth of administrative criminology funded by governmental bodies. This type of criminology characteristically involves a low level of theory, is essentially managerialist responding to pressing issues, favours highly quantitative methods and tends to produce equivocal conclusions. It also does little to generate a cumulative body of knowledge. On the other hand, academic criminology has become dominated by varieties of liberal criminology – radical, humanist and pessimist. Liberal criminology tends to be minimal or anti-statist, and often anti-punishment. Even in its more radical forms it tends not to talk about social structures, political economy or social class and makes sweeping generalisations about the nature and direction of social control. For example, some leading liberals have reduced the complexity of the changing forms of crime control to a surge of punitiveness, although it is not clear why such punitiveness should arise or how exactly it is to be identified or overcome. In its more pessimistic forms it claims that nothing works, or that interventions only make things worse. Alternatively they fail to present viable alternatives and instead advocate ‘the unfinished’. 

The combination of administrative criminology, on one side, and liberal academic criminology on the other, is to produce a criminological enterprise that is either short sighted and pragmatic, or alternatively largely disengaged from the major issues of crime control.  Academic criminologists increasingly engage in particular topics which are studied in isolation from the major social, economic and economic changes that are taking place in our increasingly globalised world.  As a substitute for examining their topics within these wider contexts they all too often draw on accounts produced by those radical liberals who make some attempt to capture the wider picture. However, as in the case of punitiveness these accounts are predictably inadequate.

Let us take the two main components of the criminological enterprise – crime and punishment. Undoubtedly the most significant development in living memory is the crime drop. The decrease in nearly all forms of crime internationally over the last two decades is unprecedented and was not predicted. An undergraduate student writing an essay in the 1980s predicting a substantial and sustained drop in crime would have either been failed or referred for counselling. Although crime began to fall in both the USA and the UK from the early 1990s it was not until 2000 that the first book on the crime drop appeared in America. Academic criminologists, it would seem like the media (who they are very quick to criticise) were either not interested in this development or did not know how to respond to this good news. Since 2000 there has been a slow trickle of commentaries on this major development but much of it is inconclusive and equivocal. 

Initially, a number of factors were suggested to account for the crime drop – policing policies, mass incarceration and changing patterns of drug use. These were discounted fairly quickly since they did not account very well for international decreases in crime or the continuous decrease in crime across the board over time. Subsequently, a variety of factors were suggested including the introduction of legal abortions, increased security, changing drinking habits and the decrease of lead in the atmosphere. Needless to say all of these explanations suffer the same limitations as the earlier explanations to varying degrees. Characteristically Andrew Karmen in is book New York Murder Mystery (2000) argues that the decline in homicide has been a ‘fortuitous confluence’ of factors, while Franklin Zimring (2007) suggests that there was no single cause - or even an evident cause - but claims that the decline is an example of multiple causation with none of the many contributing factors playing a dominant role.

Moving beyond these liberal and generally inconclusive accounts, it would seem that we need to examine the role of wider structural and social processes such as the shift to PostFordism, the growth of a service economy and accompanying changes in the nature of masculinity and social relations. In addition, as the leading conservative criminologist James Q. Wilson has suggested there are important cultural changes that also underpin this development.

In relation to punishment what we might call the ‘liberal turn’ in academia has faired no better. If we take imprisonment as an example we have seen hundreds of books and articles over the last two or three decades telling us that prisons do not work. The various deficiencies are repeatedly identified and in this way the liberals aim to claim the moral high ground. However, it is difficult if not impossible to find anyone these days that claim that prisons do work and even governmental authorities admit that ‘prisons can be an expensive way of making bad people worse’. The liberal solution takes one of two forms – reductionism or abolitionism. That is, first to reduce the number of people in prison. However, as there is no agreement about what is the correct number of people in prison, the reductionists inevitably claim that there are always too many. This reduces the issue of prisons and punishment to a ’numbers game’ and notions of social justice are sidelined. The other option is abolitionism in which advocates want to see mass decarceration and in some cases the greater use of community based sentences. However, abolitionists often claim that engaging in prison reform and improving prison conditions only serves to re-legitimise prisons, while more pessimistic liberals argue that developing community based ‘alternatives’ only reinforces the centrality of imprisonment while encouraging net widening. Rarely, do these liberals address the realist question of who should go to prison, for what purpose and for how long.

The failure of criminology as Jock Young pointed out some time ago lies in its inability to develop an approach that coherent, sophisticated and useful. The failure to produce ‘joined up’ criminology tends to result in what Elliott Currie refers to as “So What?’’ criminology. That is, a criminology which is theoretically thin, methodologically weak and has little or no policy relevance. The ultimate aim of this book is to address these deficiencies and to re-establish realist criminology, while contributing to the development of a more critical and progressive approach to crime and punishment - an approach aimed at reducing suffering, abuse, exploitation and victimisation, while improving the operation of the criminal justice system and thereby contributing to the goal of achieving greater social justice. 

Note: Palgrave Macmillan are offering a 20% discount on this book when ordered directly from them.  Just quote PM14TWENTY  

Go to: http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=770617

www.rogermatthews.net 

Special Green Edition of Radical Criminology Call for Papers

Articles are invited for a special ‘Green’ edition of the journal Radical Criminology. The overarching theme of the edition will be arguing for a green criminology as a means of addressing environmental harms (including animal abuse and wildlife crime) which are often ignored by mainstream criminology.

The editors are interested in papers that discuss how a green criminological perspective can inform criminal justice and social policy perspectives and wider social harms that extend beyond narrow definitions of crime and criminal behaviour.  The special edition follows the journal’s ‘deep green’ perspective which draws attention to and opposes the integral relationships between capitalist exploitation, business practices, and the destruction of local and global ecosystems.  We are particularly interested in papers on the following themes:

·       Environmental harm as crime

·       Environmental regulation and corporate environmental crime

·       The complicity of states, their institutions and capitalist society  in the destruction of ecosystems

·       Animal Protection and Wildlife crime

·       Social and ecological justice

·       The importance and impact of green criminology

Other topics fitting within the scope of the journal’s radical manifesto (available online) and the specific ‘green’ perspectives of the special edition are also encouraged.

Full length/feature articles to a maximum of 9,000 words in length and shorter pieces up to 4,000 words are both welcomed.  The deadline for abstracts is 31 March 2014 and a decision on acceptance will be communicated to authors by 30 April 2014.  Full versions of accepted papers will be required by 30 July 2014 with authors expected to respond to peer-reviewers’ comments with final papers no later than 20 October 2014.

Proposals should include a title and an abstract of no more than 300 words, as well as the author’s name, address, telephone number, email address, and institutional affiliation and should be sent to one of the editors below:

Dr Angus Nurse, Middlesex University – email a.nurse@mdx.ac.uk

Dr Gary Potter, London South Bank University – Email potterg@lsbu.ac.uk

Dr Nic Groombridge, St Mary’s University – email nicholas.groombridge@smuc.ac.uk

Journal Website: http://journal.radicalcriminology.org/index.php/rc

How many times women assaulted before reporting to police?

A quick search of newspapers on Lexis Library shows that the claim that a woman suffers 35 instances of domestic violence before she reports to the police is still going strong.  This should not be a surprise as both Women’s Aid and Refuge repeat the statistic. See The Independent  (9 September 2013) or Sarah Wollaston MP writing in the Daily Telegraph (19 June 2013) in the wake of the accusations against Charles Saatchi in respect of his very public assault on Nigella Lawson.  Wollaston says, ‘On average a woman is assaulted 35 times before first contacting the police’ without giving a source and links it to other specific English and Welsh stats.  Further examples are  the Daily Post (North Wales) on December 24, 2009 or Grimsby Evening Telegraph, January 12, 2004 or even The Guardian, October 15, 1993.

Many of the receptions of this stat give no source but Refuge do, as the work of Peter Jaffe (1982) but with no further details of publication or journal title.  Whilst much of his work is featured on his institute’s associated website to end abuse no title as early as this is featured.

I have no doubt about the seriousness of domestic violence or that delays, sometimes fatal, occur in victims reporting.  Any criminologist can take you through the problems of crime stats but this article from Full Fact examines whether the figures were 400,000 or more than double that.  There is also a wealth of research pointing at the delays and poor decision making of the police and other authorities - some of it by Jaffe and various colleagues.  However, I’ve always worried about the prevalence of the statistic and its failure, seemingly, to be updated.

I’ve several times tried to persuade undergrad students doing dissertations to track it down or to update it but without success.  So given the coverage of Clare's’ Law and International Women’s Day I decided to look into it myself.

It did not prove easy.  A search on Google Scholar didn’t seem to throw up a single authored work by him published in 1982 but intimations from references in other work suggested a joint article by Jaffe, P., and Burris, C. A. (1982).  Their  An integrated response to wife battering: A community model. Ottawa: Research Report of the Solicitor General of Canada contains the ’35 times’ figure but is not the main focus.

Some of the confusion might come from Jaffe himself as in  ‘The Impact of Police Charges in Incidents of Wife Abuse’ (with Wolfe, Telford and Austin Journal of Family Violence Vo1 No 1 1986) he incorrectly cites Burris, C. A., and Jaffe, P. (1984). ‘Wife battering: A well-kept secret’ as the source for the ’35 times’ figure!

Jaffe and Burris examined the processing of ‘wife assault’ cases (the terminology of the day) through the criminal justice system in London, Ontario, Canada and found that between January and June of 1979, 222 females reported assaults or threatened assaults by their partners or ex-partners. These women had been assaulted an average of 35 times before 1979.

So an old, small, non-UK study still ‘rules’.  I am sure domestic violence researchers in the UK and elsewhere struggle to get their voices heard in policy and media but guess they must have newer and more relevant figures than Jaffe and Burris.  My hunch is that the continued popularity of the figure is, in part, due to its narrative impact for campaigners and lazy or hard-pressed journalists.

So my challenge to DV researchers is to get your figures into the media.