Attitudes toward Specialized Police Stations to Address Violence against Women

• In Event: The Intersection of Gender, Criminal Violence, and Politics in Latin America

Abstract

As a response to gender-based violence, several countries across the world have adopted specialized police units led by women or with a higher representation of female police officers. Besides preventing violence against women, these units seek to increase access to services for survivors. However, recent studies for a few countries have presented mixed evidence about the effects of specialized police stations, suggesting that variations in policy design results in divergent outcomes. With a focus on El Salvador, this project contributes to this literature by examining how the gender composition of specialized police stations shape citizens’ attitudes toward the police and police policy. This project tests pre-registered hypotheses based on an online survey experiment that varies specialized police stations’ gender composition to evaluate impacts on police legitimacy and police budget spending. The results suggest that both men and women’s preferences for specialized policing depends on units’ gender composition, but in nuanced ways. More specifically, making women aware of the existence of specialized police units as such does not increase women’s perceptions of police legitimacy, but it does when they become aware that female police officers are involved at least at the same rate as men. Further, men are only more likely to prefer a higher budget allocation toward specialized police units when these are led by men and women rather than only women police officers. Taken together the results suggest that policy design shapes men and women’s attitudes toward specialized policing, potentially explaining varying effects across countries.

Author

• Abby B. Cordova, University of Notre Dame