The Situational Context of Police Sexual Violence: Data and Policy Implications

The horrors of sexual crimes perpetrated by law enforcement officers are laid bare in this study of 669 cases of police sexual violence. Here, authors Philip Matthew Stinson, Robert W. Taylor, and John Liederbach identify three scenarios in which law enforcement officers inflict sexual violence upon their mostly-female victims: 1) “driving while female,” 2) child predation, and 3) involvement in the sex worker industry. Especially sobering is the fact that, as opposed to law enforcement doing its solemn duty to report criminality on the part of fellow police officers, “citizens rather than police initiated the detection of the crimes in almost all the cases, whether the context involved child predation (94.8%), driving while female (94.7%), or the sex worker industry (90.8%).” Rather than an anomaly, sexual predation on the part of police, along with the routine cover-ups that perpetuate these crimes, appears to be just one component of the “rotten barrel” that depicts a culture of police corruption