Narratives of Domestic Violence: Policing, Identity, and Indexicality

Domestic violence is an intractable social problem that must be understood in order to be eradicated. Using theories of indexicality, identity, and narrative, Andrus presents data from interviews she conducted with victims and law enforcement, and analyses the narratives of their interactions and the identities that emerge. She gives insight into law enforcement views on violence, and prevalent misconceptions, in order to create resources to improve communication with victim/survivors. She also analyzes the ways in which identity emerges and is performed via narrative constructions of domestic violence and encounters between police and victim/survivors. By giving voice to the victims of domestic violence, this book provides powerful insights into the ways that ideology and commonplace misconceptions impact the social construction of domestic violence. It will be invaluable to students and researchers in discourse analysis, applied linguistics and forensic linguistics.

"This book is about narratives about interactions between police officers and domestic violence victim/survivors. Using theories of indexicality, identity, and narrative, I show how police officers conceive of victim/survivors and vice versa, as those(mis)conceptions are represented in narrative. I also analyze the ways in which identity emerges in and is performed via narrative constructions of domestic violence and encounters between police and victim/survivors. I argue that Identity emerges in an "indexical field" (Eckert) made up of different elements, each of which mean differently depending on the identity emerging in the field and the person telling the story. Thus, what domestic violence means and even what it looks like is different for victim/survivors than it is for police officers. Identity also emerges in storytelling when the storyteller constructs identities for characters in the story world that are then positioned against by the storyteller in the process of telling the story. Through the indexical and identity analysis of narrative, one issue that I address is the dismissal of emotional violence from the indexical field of domestic violence in police discourse. I argue that we need more resources to account for issues of emotional abuse in police responses to domestic violence"--