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Between March 2019 and March 2020 in England and Wales (excludingGreater Manchester), there were 1,288,018 recorded incidents of domestic violence(DV, otherwise known as ‘domestic abuse’ or ‘DA’), an increase of 4.2% (51,404incidents) on the previous year (Office for National Statistics 2020). Only 56%of these were classified by police as ‘crimes’ (Office for National Statistics 2020).Additionally, despite the annual rise of DV the charging rate of suspects fell in2019–2020 by 20.5% (Crown Prosecution Service 2020). This raises two primaryquestions: 1) why are almost half of reported DV incidents not considered ‘crimes’?and 2) in spite of rising numbers of incidents, why do prosecutions continue to fall?These questions are central to this paper. A possible factor influencing attritionrates concerns the language used by police officers to record DV incidents. Thispaper, then, explores whether the linguistic choices made by police officers onjudicial reports of DV in a sample of cases collected from the year 2010 reflectimplicit attitudinal biases, that in turn, can potentially pre-empt out-of-court casedisposals within contemporaneous DV cases. If so, this may also go some way toexplaining the gap between cases reported as DV crimes and cases recorded assuch. The dataset under analysis comes from a corpus of 13 police-authored DVcases sent to prosecutors for charging decisions in one calendar month in 2010 (formore detail about the corpus, see Lynn and Canning 2021; Lea and Lynn 2012.All 13 cases were returned with a ‘simple caution’ outcome, which means thatnone progressed to prosecution. Two of these cases are used as representative ofthe 13 that comprise the corpus. The analysis of the data is carried out usingthe model of transitivity (Berry 1975; Halliday 1994) to identify participant roles,actions, and circumstances as well as their syntactic distribution. The analysisshows that officers’ lexical and syntactic choices yield patterns of agency thatdownplay suspects’ culpability on the one hand, and background victims on theother. The paper concludes by arguing that how police present agency, participantroles, and circumstantial elements in reports to prosecutors can encode a ‘preferredoutcome’ resulting in more lenient charging decisions. |
