Police responses to intimate partner sexual violence in South Asian communities

Recognition of sexual violence as a serious problem has been reflected in the wide range of initiatives that over the past 20 years in the UK have been designed to tackle this problem. Emphasis on prevention, protection, and redress has enabled criminal justice and other responses to become increasingly embedded. Nevertheless, a significant lacuna remains in terms of the contours, context, and consequences of intimate partner sexual violence in South Asian communities. Despite victim-survivors’ offering solid evidence of the prevalence of sexual violence in these communities, this kind of abuse is generally not reported to criminal justice agencies (Gilligan, P. and Akhtar, S. (2006). ‘Cultural Barriers to the Disclosure of Child Sexual Abuse in Asian Communities: Listening to What Women Say.’ British Journal of Social Work 36(8): 1361–1377; Hohl, K. and Stanko, E. (2015). ‘Complaints of Rape and the Criminal Justice System: Fresh Evidence on the Attrition Problem in England and Wales.’ European Journal of Criminology 12(3): 324–341). Anecdotally, however, this type of violence does appear to have been increasing over time. With that backdrop in mind, this article looks at how four police areas are currently responding to intimate partner sexual violence where the victim-survivor of it is from a South Asian community. In particular, the article evaluates police officers’ levels of understanding with regard to pertinent cultural values and, in turn, assesses the level of training given to help with this awareness, and the appropriateness of front-line police practice. Finally, consideration is also given to what needs to change in order to encourage more victim-survivors from South Asian communities to come forward