Profile of Lena Gryshchuk

Award Received: SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship

Awarded for the project: Police officers' response to intimate partner violence cases with female offenders

Faculty: Arts

Department: Psychology

Project supervised by: Mary Ann Campbell, PhD

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a serious societal issue causing significant physical and psychological harm to the victim and their families, as well as societal costs in terms of lost work time, health care costs, social agency costs, and criminal justice system costs. Although males tend to be the more frequent perpetrators of IPV, a number of researchers have called for studies of the specificity and frequency of female IPV perpetration. Thus, it is important to understand nuances in IPV that may relate to perpetrator gender. Such nuances have implications for risk appraisal for subsequent IPV and for designing risk prevention and risk management policies.

 The goal of my study is to examine police action and risk mitigation action taken for IPV and how these actions are influenced by perpetrator gender. This project has a mixed-method design that will include semi-structured interviews with police officers, as well as review of New Brunswick municipal police agency files with female IPV suspects. Anticipated findings from this work will inform theoretical models of police discretion when responding to IPV calls and may be of relevance to domestic violence training and abuse protocols developed by agencies tasked with responding to domestic violence.