Living in the Margins: Assessing Police Engagement as a Form of Victim Help-Seeking Through Legal Estrangement

• In Event: Gendered Voices and the Intersectionality of Victimization

Abstract

Objectives: Police involvement in the aftermath of victimization experiences are generally required to open the channels for victim support services, yet extant literature on victim help-seeking currently remains separate from research on police notification. This paper offers one attempt to move police reporting literature into help-seeking frameworks. The legal estrangement theory provides a lens to examine victim help-seeking decisions that are complex for individuals living in impoverished neighborhoods that have high violent crime rates and the prevalence of the victim-perpetrator overlap.
Data/Methods: The current study draws from semi-structured interviews of 98 men and women aged 18 to 40 living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Victim narratives were analyzed using a deductive strategy to elucidate the relationship between victim-help seeking behaviors, in the form of police engagement, and the legal estrangement framework.
Results: Legal estrangement is present in the narratives of victims where the socio-legal processes of procedural injustice, vicarious marginalization, and structural exclusion are reflected in help-seekers and non-help-seekers.
Conclusions: Help-seeking is a dynamic process, and while legal estrangement contextualizes the landscape of help-seeking decisions among minorities, other socio-ecological and situational characteristics simultaneously influence help-seeking behaviors.

Author

• Trinh Nguyen, Temple Unversity