Domestic violence and the spatial-moral order of home in calls to police

Purpose: Domestic violence is a global problem that reached new visibility during the COVID-19 pandemic. Lockdowns were predicated on the idea of home as a site of safety. Yet for many people, home is a site of violence and abuse. Lockdowns provided a new form of spatial-moral order where previously ordinary activities of coming or going from home took on new moral meanings.

Approach: We use discursive psychology and conversation analysis to analyse calls to police about violence made during lockdown. The data are 200 calls to emergency and non-emergency police lines in New Zealand and the United Kingdom. We analyse how callers describe movements to and from home as policeable matters and how call-takers respond to those descriptions.

Findings: Callers described others’ behaviours as transgressions of the spatial-moral order of lockdown. Call-takers responded in different ways that configured lockdown breaches as either relevant policeable problems or as matters of personal responsibility. Descriptions which cast the problem as ‘live’ occasioned a police response, while those that did not convey the same urgency were met with advice to resolve the matter locally.

Originality: Examining interactions between callers and call-takers provides unique insights into how movement to and from home was understood as possibly policeable during lockdown. Our interactional approach highlights how understandings of ‘criminal behaviour’ are accomplished and negotiated in real-life encounters. We also uniquely illustrate callers’ fears from their own perspective and how these are met with different institutional responses.