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Abstract
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A police reform experiment in India shows mixed results.
One in three women has survived physical or sexual violence in her lifetime. In a wave of reforms designed in part to increase women’s access to justice for such crimes, governments around the world instituted gender quotas in police hiring (see the photo), policewomen-run counseling centers, women-only stations, and legal mandates that women officers exclusively handle cases of gender-based violence. On page 191 of this issue, Sukhtankar et al. (1) report results of the first randomized trial on these reforms. The researchers partnered with the state police in Madhya Pradesh, India, in the Hindi heartland with a reputation for deep-rooted patriarchy, to randomize the introduction of “women’s help desks”—spaces within police stations where women officers can interface with women complainants. The results are mixed: More incident reports were filed and some police officer attitudes toward violence against women changed, but women were no more likely to report crimes and the arrest rate was unaffected.
Gender-based reforms in policing share similar goals but differ in design and underlying motivation. They can be viewed as falling on a spectrum from integration to separation. On the integrated end, quotas and affirmative action increase the representation of women in the police. Typically, women officers are then assigned the same tasks and roles as men officers. This may shift norms and behaviors of officers and citizens by promoting contact between policemen and policewomen, as well as through a role-model effect. On the separated end, governments establish women-only police stations. This may empower policewomen by reducing contact with sexist policemen, and encourage complainants to report in spaces supposedly removed from patriarchal norms. Such “enclaves” also imply occupational separation: Policewomen are tasked solely with the complaints of other women, often based on essentialist assumptions that they are innately suited for such roles. Separated institutions are an implicit acknowledgment of the limits of integration: if gender norms are unlikely to change in the short term, the state must resign itself to the segregation of women officers and complainants.
Language: en |