1 Introduction

For a victim of domestic abuse,Footnote 1 summoning the police in an emergency can be a pivotal first step towards freedom. However, the trajectory of this journey is determined in part by the victim’s experience of their initial interaction with response officers during the call-out. The term call-out denotes police response officers’ period of attendance at the scene of a reported emergency,Footnote 2 typically initiated by a telephone call to the national emergency number which has resulted in the call-handler’s assessment of a high risk incident requiring immediate attention. The complex power dynamics which underpin domestic abuse generate unique communicative challenges for both victims and police in terms of reporting and responding to crimes. In the first place, victims often struggle to involve the police due to fears of repercussions from the perpetrator and institutional interventions into their lives (e.g. [10, 16, 94, 106]). These fears are compounded if victims have experienced inconsistent or poor quality police support, generating further difficulties around reaching out for help again (e.g. [10, 57, 68, 103]). At the scene, frontline officers face the “complex and sensitive work” [33: 11] of balancing procedural responsibilities and restrictions with the interpersonal considerations around interacting with potentially vulnerable victims [55, 43, see also 56]. Call-out communication is therefore complicated by an archetypal clash between institutional-lay frames (see [5] and e.g. [61, 63, 95, 99]), yet these encounters are crucial in determining how the reported incident continues to unfold, both in the immediate call-out context and throughout the wider legal process. Despite mounting pressure on UK police forces to address weaknesses in their handling of domestic abuse cases [33, 34], there is a dearth of previous empirical research using authentic data to shed light on what happens during the consequential first response stage. This article forms part of a wider qualitative projectFootnote 3 which addresses the research gap by examining fourteen first response interactions between officers and alleged victims (henceforth AVs) from one police force area in the UK, with police body-worn video footage as the data source. The research is motivated by the belief that a more nuanced understanding of communication in the first response context can inform the improvement of services provided by the police and other agencies to those affected by domestic abuse.

This article focuses on two call-outs from 2019 following the AVs’ emergency calls to report physical assaults in progress. Analysis will demonstrate the key evidence-gathering activities of visually inspecting and photographing injuries, both of which involve officers’ advancement into the AVs’ immediate personal space. A clear initial comparison can be drawn, in that one AV is female and the other is male,Footnote 4 both reporting opposite-gender suspects. It is therefore vital to acknowledge the fact that domestic abuse is overwhelmingly perpetrated by men against women [77] and to avoid promoting the notion of equal victimisation across genders (see e.g. [2, 37, 49]). Rather, the focus on these particular call-outs is motivated by the fact that they constitute the two occasions from the first phase of the study which involve physical engagement between officer and AV. Nonetheless, at the same time they provide a unique opportunity, arising from the inductive analysis of a rare dataset, to consider the potential influence of gender on how physical examination is conducted at the scene.

Primarily, this paper is concerned with the microinteractional means by which participants manage personal space during the process of gathering physical evidence from the AV, and how this interactional behaviour intersects with the co-construction of power relations between speakers. In the first response context, spatial dynamics are characterised by the interpolation of the institution into the private realm, whereby police are endowed with the institutional right to enter the space, then control access and movement. This power is further licensed by the fact that both AVs in this study have summoned the police via the emergency number, thereby inviting officers into their territory. Both call-outs represented here take place in an environment associated with the AVs’ daily lives: AV1’s home and AV2’s rented workspace. Analysis will explore how participants manage the resultant redistribution of authority in relation to the delicate task of entering the AV’s personal space. To this end, I take an inductive approach grounded in conversation analysis [81], a fine-grained, data-driven methodology which does not presuppose interactional features of interest. The approach is informed by the concepts of interactional space as “action-shaping and action-shaped” [72: 250] and participation as “actions demonstrating forms of involvement performed by parties within evolving structures of talk” [29: 222]. There is therefore a mutually constitutive relationship between interactional space, participation frameworks and talk. The section to follow will provide an overview of the key sociolegal issues which inform our understanding of this understudied research site. Then, taking each case study in turn, the analysis section will explore the explicit and implicit discursive orientations to spatial dynamics, with a focus on how authority within this space is (re)constructed through talk on a moment-to-moment basis. These dynamics will be discussed in relation to victims’ potential vulnerabilities, the police-victim relationship and the nature of the evidence produced during the call-out. Finally, the conclusion will consider the implications for future research and potential avenues to inform professional practice.

2 Research Context: Police Procedure, Personal Space and Power

Domestic abuse is legally defined in the UK as any incident or course of conduct that includes physical or sexual abuse, violent or threatening behaviour, controlling or coercive behaviour, psychological, emotional and other forms of abuse [19]. The police process of categorising incidents according to the relevant criminal offence groups begins in the emergency control room and continues when officers arrive at the scene. First responders’ primary responsibilitiesFootnote 5 are: safeguarding, gathering evidence for an initial investigation, assessing risk and, potentially, making an arrest. The ‘evidential difficulties’ associated with domestic abuse cases [77] place the onus on frontline officers in two main aspects: to encourage AVs’ confidence in the police and criminal justice system, and to gather stand-alone evidence in the event that the AV declines to pursue prosecution. Both physical and verbal forms of evidence are relevant to the present analysis. Physical evidence is captured photographically, via body-worn footage along with smartphone photographs [13], and visually, for inclusion in the attending officer’s written report (see [9]). Verbal evidence centres on the AV’s initial account of the reported incident, which functions dually as evidence (although see [31, 78]) and a means by which officers diagnose [1] the immediate situation and next steps. First response practice varies considerably according to myriad procedural and situational factors, including officers’ specialist training, the immediate risk of harm, the presence of the suspect and/or children, the AV’s ability or inclination to accept help and the potential for intoxication. Because these interactions are unpredictable, high-pressure and time-sensitive, official procedure remains subject to ad hoc adaptation by officers [43, 55, 64].

Institutional talk is neither restricted to nor imposed by specific material settings (e.g. [36, 84]) but it is shaped by the settings in which it occurs (see e.g. [45, 59, 107]). Drew and Heritage found that non-formal settings which involve formal procedures are characterised by conversational or quasi-conversational talk which has less uniformity in interactional roles and patterns [20: 28]. Call-out settings thus differ markedly from formal settings such as police interview rooms, not only in the lack of predetermined interactional structure but also in participants’ expectations around movement, proximity and touch. Furthermore, call-out interaction typically occurs in settings in which AVs are ‘fixed’ on a day-to-day basis (see [26]), as borne out in the fact that one case study analysed here occurs in the AV’s private home and the other in the AV’s barbershop. Yet call-outs are bound by formal procedures for securing safety, making an arrest and assessing immediate risk, amounting to a ‘legitimate intrusion’ [86] of the institutional into the private which entails a reconfiguration of control within the space. However, first responders are the first authority figures victims encounter after an abusive episode, and coercive and disruptive police behaviour within a space that carries physical and mental associations with trauma could intensify victims’ vulnerability (e.g. [54, 79]). Whereas guidelines for investigative interviews with vulnerable and intimidated witness advise against using the same location as the traumatic event [69: 67], the diagnostic function of first response communication centres on the officers’ immediate need to elicit the victim’s account of what happened. The parallel between this intrusion and perpetrators’ abusive invasion of space underscores frontline officers’ power, in their potential to restore some sense of agency to victims during these interactions.

The critical thrust of this research centres on “the fundamental role of space in enacting social practices” [101: 90]. To address the lack of knowledge about a consequential gatekeeping stage of the criminal justice process, an exploratory study requires an approach which can reveal the ways in which “language represents and contributes to the (re)production of social reality” [67: 7]. I thus examine participants’ treatment of AVs’ personal space for the ways in which their behaviour reflects and reinforces or renegotiates social power relations. This article demonstrates the physical evidence-gathering activities of visual examination and injury photographs, both of which entail officers encroaching into the AV’s ‘body-buffer zone’ [42], the space we need to have free around us to feel comfortable. I follow Hall’s [30] definition of personal space as being within approximately 120 cm of the body and adapt his term ‘intimate space’ (within 45 cm) to immediate personal space. The Ministry of Justice guidelines for vulnerable witness interviews highlight the sensitivities around entering their ‘personal bubble’, warning that “an invasion of a person’s personal space, especially by a stranger, can be emotionally disturbing” [69: 205–206]. These sensitivities are also addressed in a medical context by the NHS chaperone policy for intimate examinations [25]. The potential for trauma is exacerbated in first response encounters, during which victims must describe a recent attack which occurred in their present environment. Correspondingly, guidelines place emphasis on ‘victim care issues’ arising from collecting photographic and visually-recorded evidence, including stipulations that the victim’s preference for location of the activity and gender of the officer who conducts it be accommodated “where possible” [14]. At the same time, there is a procedural emphasis on the primacy of evidence of physical harm, not least to bolster an evidence-led case should the AV withdraw their support [13]. In pursuit of this goal, the guidelines recognise that officers may require a more flexible approach than in formal institutional settings to ensure they capture evidence that ‘can’t wait’ for a more controlled environment in which to collect it [87]. Given the gender distribution, whereby the case studies involve male officers inspecting opposite- and same-gender AVs, the potential influence of gender in participants’ management of physical harm and personal space will be considered throughout analysis. Existing research indicates that both gender configurations entail particular sensitivities. Whereas women subjected to violence may feel intimidated by physically dominant male officers, male victims of female perpetrators often face representational difficulties stemming from conflicting cultural assumptions around masculinity and victimhood (e.g. [8, 15, 22, 38, 75]). This study provides a point of departure for further research that might expand our understanding of how spatial dynamics influence women and men’s comparative experiences during call-outs.

The understandable difficulty of securing access to real face-to-face interactions from call-outs and similarly high-pressure contexts is demonstrated by the lack of empirical research in this vein. Owing to these constraints, some studies of first response interaction have gleaned insights from analysis of simulated interactions (e.g. [18, 60, 100]) and reality TV footage [52, 53]. Kidwell’s work is enlightening in demonstrating the importance of embodied and other non-verbal aspects such as eye gaze [52], distinguishing these high-pressure police-victim interactions from the otherwise comparable context of emergency calls (e.g. [102]). This study of a previously hidden investigative stage supplies the missing link between related research on calls for help (e.g. [90, 92, 96]), police reports [9, 58], police interviews (e.g. [4, 62, 98]) and courtroom discourse (e.g. [7, 23, 44]) to deepen our understanding of victims’ interactions with institutional actors throughout the legal process.

3 Data and Methodology

The case study data for analysis here represent two first response call-outs in 2019 within one police force area in the UK (England and Wales jurisdiction). In both situations, the AVs summoned the police by calling the national emergency telephone number: 999. Following complex ethical and legal measures, I obtained the first batch of body-worn video footage (of three incidents) from the partner police force in 2019 and the second (of eleven incidents) in 2021. The size of the full dataset is indicative of the many difficulties associated with sharing this type of data. Given the size of the wider dataset comprising fourteen incidents, the study does not claim to represent first response practice in any generalised sense. Rather, the aim is to illuminate some key dimensions of discursive behaviour during a consequential speech event which has been identified by a wealth of self-report research as a site of interpersonal and procedural complexity (e.g. [43, 55, 64, 88]), but which has not yet been studied using authentic spoken data.

The first batch of data, on which this study is based, was made available for twenty-four hours, during which time I made audio recordings along with a rich description and rough sketches of the visual information. I anonymised all names and other identifying details and then transcribed the audio recordings using an adapted version of Jefferson’s [47] conversation analysis transcription system (using the conventions listed at the end of the article). Because I was not permitted to retain either video data or screenshots, the degree of precision achieved by a multimodal Mondadan transcription [73] was not feasible. Instead, I adopted a modified intralinear transcription method which represents non-verbal information anchored diacritically to moments within the stream of talk, resembling similar approaches in previous multimodal studies (e.g. [48, 65]). The lack of visual information to guide the reader has necessitated more detail in the intralinear description. While this format is limited in its ability to capture the vivid multimodal dynamics of first response interaction, this method was successful in resolving the privacy-related concerns of the partner force and creating enough ‘maneuvering space’ [17: 2] for the project to proceed.

Conversation analysis was then used to unpack the microinteractional means by which speakers co-construct authority within AVs’ personal space on a moment-to-moment basis. From the audio recordings and transcripts, I isolated each instance of physical engagement (including preparatory discussion) between officer and AV and then analysed these instances according to the central principles of conversation analysis, including the sequential organisation and design of turns [81], to reveal the explicit and implicit discursive orientations to spatial dynamics. As explored by Mondada and other scholars, a stretch of talk adjusts itself to transformations within the interactional space, which is thus both “action-shaping and action-shaped” [72: 250, emphasis in original] (see also [71, 74]). This dialectic draws from Goodwin and Goodwin’s work on participation, defined as “actions demonstrating forms of involvement performed by parties within evolving structures of talk” [29: 222] (see also [28]), with these actions including embodied, non-verbal and spatial means of either facilitating or constraining participation. As such, throughout analysis I also remained alert to the entextualising influence of police body-worn video, which “reflexively contributes to the shaping of the interactional space, inter alia by the way in which the camera delimits the visible and documentable frame of the publicly recorded actions” [72: 256] (see also [32, 35, 70]).

4 Analysis

4.1 Visually Inspecting Injuries

This first analysis section focuses on AV1’s call-out, during which the officers inspect her for injuries approximately eight minutes into their visit to her home. Up to this stage, AV1 has cooperated by attempting, upon police request, to describe the assault by her ex-partner. However, her account has been repeatedly disrupted by the multiple attending officers’ movements in and out of the kitchen, where AV1 has remained standing. She is visibly distressed and crying throughout the call-out, as is evident in the examples to follow. The first physical inspection occurs following AV1’s introduction of the topic of “marks” during a narrative turn, which she is providing for the officers present, PO1 (male) and PO2 (female).

Extract 1 AV is the alleged victim; PO1 and PO2 are two of the five attending officers. The three participants are standing in AV’s kitchen, while the suspect is in the police van outside the house.

figure a

In response to PO2’s request for detail about the suspect’s behaviour, AV1 initiates the inspection with a verbal cue (line 4) and a display of checking the relevant areas, in an embodied invitation for the officers to examine her. She continues to facilitate the activity by maneuvering her arms and then her head during lines 12–15 according to PO1’s focus. Nonetheless, PO1 acknowledges the invasion of her immediate personal space and displays his efforts to complete the task as unobtrusively as possible. His quieter tone throughout this sequence contrasts with the officers’ insistent questioning of AV1 at other points during this call-out, and he twice asks her permission to have a look (lines 6 and 10). His specificity about moving her hair displays PO1’s awareness of victims’ potential sensitivity to touch, and he touches AV1 only briefly here in line 12. This degree of delicacy is particularly appropriate considering AV1’s descriptions (lines 2–4; 8–9) of the suspect grabbing her head, neck and arms. Nonetheless, the proximal intimacy of the inspection creates a temporary participation framework which excludes PO2, who becomes a side participant. As the female officer, PO2 would be the more appropriate choice for a task that invades the AV’s close personal space. First response guidelines address this issue in relation to injury photographs, for which “the victim’s preference for the gender of the person taking photographs should be respected” [12], but here AV1 is given no choice.

In contrast to PO1’s gentle approach to the haptic aspects of the inspection, the officers’ sudden direction of torchlight at AV1’s head in line 7 has a strikingly intrusive effect in the dimly lit kitchen, particularly as PO1 moves closer to her in line 10. AV1’s head movement in line 7 makes her discomfort explicit and contrasts with her cooperation in other aspects of the inspection. (This reaction echoes her explanation, earlier in this call-out, that she would be “blinded” by the overhead kitchen light that an officer suddenly switched on, reiterating her sensitivity in this regard.) Yet here the officers do not mitigate the torchlight intrusion by explaining their need for better light or requesting permission to shine it in her face. The contrastive management of touch and torchlight corresponds with the officers’ prioritisation of the tangible over intangible aspects of AV1’s experience, in line with their ongoing quest for clearer evidence of assault. The AV’s needs are thereby decontextualised according to what the officers have derived from training, instead of responding to her expressed needs in the moment.

PO1 does mitigate the use of torchlight when he briefly resumes the inspection a few minutes later: Extract 2

figure b

With this second inspection, the officers advance further into AV1’s immediate personal space to focus on her eye area, which also involves shining the torches directly at her again. Although her rapid blinking suggests discomfort, AV1 continues to cooperate by moving closer and angling her forehead to facilitate the activity. This time PO1 acknowledges the intrusion (lines 6–7), although his subsequent question in lines 10–12 requires AV1 to look at his face and therefore turn her gaze into the light. The officer’s claim that he is ‘trying not to’ shine the torch in her eye deflects responsibility for the intrusion by framing it as an unavoidable task that he is trying to manage sensitively. The formulation also functions dually ‘for the benefit of the tape’ [89] to foreground PO1’s victim-centred approach.

Interestingly, the physical proximity engenders a brief moment of rapport that is singular in this call-out. PO1 assumes a relational footing with his accounting in line 6 (‘trying not to’) and AV1 reciprocates with an apology (line 8) that displays her continuing orientation to the officers’ needs. Her use of slang to characterise the visible manifestations of distress (tears and eye makeup) on her face as ‘crap’ breaks frame and defuses the solemnity with which PO1 has conducted the inspection so far. The note of levity sets up the mutual orientation to humour in lines 15–16 which further mitigates the invasiveness of the activity. The fact that AV1 has drawn attention to the ‘crap’ on her face licenses PO1 to cite her sweat and tears as ‘obviously’ a hindrance without the degree of face-threat this would otherwise entail. The laughter particles punctuating her agreement in line 15 frame the issue as a laughable, and PO1 takes this up with echoing particles in the same line as he closes off the activity (see [39, 41, 46]).

The physical inspection in Extract 2 entails a series of face-threatening actions, beginning with PO1’s interruption in line 4 and culminating in his inability to determine the presence of bruising due to the matter on AV1’s face. The participants cooperate in constructing a moment of rapport which provides some relief from the awkwardness of the situation, conveying the officer’s awareness of AV1’s potential sensitivities and her alignment with his efforts in this regard (see e.g. [66]). This moment is striking because otherwise during this call-out the officers pay no such attention to relational work and rapport, despite AV1’s evident distress from start to finish. As a result, the physical inspection is singled out as the activity requiring the most sensitivity, again reflecting the overriding police prioritisation of physical violence over other forms of abuse.

Nonetheless, in both extracts above, the physical inspection disrupts the narrative. The activity is framed both times as an insertion sequence stemming from AV1’s account of the suspect’s behaviour in Extract 1, but the spatial reconfiguration and primacy of action over talk shift the focus away from her story to a greater degree than would a verbal insertion sequence. In this context, however, the disruption seems unavoidable; AV1’s invitation to inspect her (Extract 1, line 4) creates an opportunity for the officers to document vital physical evidence in a way that gives her some control over the inherently invasive process. This practical consideration brings to the fore the ‘competing demands’ [12, 33] faced by first response officers, in that the shift to gathering physical evidence in both examples above obscures the verbal evidence that is also being produced.

In the first place in Extract 1, when AV1 introduces the topic of violence in lines 2–5, PO1 homes in on the opportunity and interrupts before she can finish specifying what the suspect did to cause the marks (‘from when he-’). Yet later in the call-out, this detail will prove central to the officers’ increasingly coercive questioning. Similarly, later in this extract, AV1 produces more new information (lines 8–9), using continuous present tense and generic ‘you’ to depict an ongoing pattern of violence. (Familiarity with injury is also implied in her later characterisation of the physical marks as ‘nothing major’.) Neither officer acknowledges this information and PO1 again interrupts (line 10) with a question that refocuses AV1’s attention on the immediate inspection activity. While she persists in line 14–15 with an account of her thought process during the attack, PO1’s overlapping ‘alright’ marks the end of the inspection and displays his inattention to what she is saying. The assessment that she is ‘alright’ is incongruous following her prior depiction of panic, again displaying the officer’s lack of engagement with the non-physical aspects of AV1’s experience. Yet later in this call-out, the connection between the suspect’s history of violence and AV1’s fear of him on this occasion will prove evidentially salient, when the officers shift their focus from assault to threat, with questions like “did you feel that he was gunna hurt you”. The officers’ practical need to examine AV1 in Extract 1 obscures freely produced information that she will later have to reiterate under pressure, revealing the delicate relationship between managing interactional space, sustaining attentiveness, and producing a coherent account.

The second inspection sequence, in Extract 2, reinstates the spatial configuration of the first, with the same disruptive effect. As PO1 interrupts AV1 in line 4 with an abrupt topic shift back to the potential for physical evidence, he raises his torch and shines it in her face without warning. The sudden physical intrusion into AV1’s immediate personal space works in tandem with the verbal interruption to signal another diversion of the officer’s attention away from what AV1 is saying. Cumulatively, these observed disruptions foster an atmosphere of instability and unpredictability within the interactional space. In contrast to the previous inspection, during which AV1 attempted to interject some narrative elements, in Extract 2 she aligns more fully with PO1’s shift in focus and suspends her account while he performs the task at hand. When the end of this sequence is signalled by PO1’s falling tone in line 16 and the participants’ corresponding step backwards, AV1 does not resume her narrative until prompted. However, PO1’s formulation in line 20 does not pick up where she left off in line 3, but redirects the narrative to the topic of grabbing, again reinforcing the primacy of physical violence. The examples from AV1’s call-out therefore show that no matter how delicately it is managed, the task of physical inspection creates a potentially disorienting clash of activity types within the interactional space that has been established for the AV’s disclosure.

4.2 Photographing Injuries

The remainder of the analysis focuses on the call-out involving the male AV (AV2), towards the end of which the attending officer (PO, also male) takes injury photographs and then initiates a brief inspection. The first two extracts below show how the photograph activity is set up in advance. By this stage, AV2 has already given his account of his female ex-partner breaking into his workspace and throwing a heavy object at him, resulting in a facial injury. The first extract begins as the officer has just established the need to take AV2’s statement.

Extract 3 AV is the alleged victim; PO is one of the three attending officers (and the only one who interacts with AV in the footage, as the others stay outside). The two participants are sitting, oriented diagonally to each other, on a bench in AV’s rented barbershop, which is closed.

figure c

Extract 4

figure d

In these extracts, PO raises (Extract 3) and revisits (Extract 4) the topic of the upcoming photograph before shifting to different topics, thereby laying the groundwork for the new activity. The officer’s deliberateness here reflects first response guidelines, which emphasise the importance of obtaining both injury photographs and the victims’ consent to do so [14]. In the first instance (Extract 3, line 2), PO’s transitional marker with falling tone clearly demarcates the prior topic of the statement from the new topic of the photograph. He then produces a specific description of what he intends to do, minimising the negative face imposition with ‘quick’ and topicalising the injury in lines 2–3 as the motivation for the action proposed in the next line. The officer thus frames the photograph activity as supportive of AV2’s complaint against the suspect. PO’s orientation to AV2’s emotional needs in line 4 (‘happy’) acknowledges the invasiveness of the activity. This relational work also mitigates the coercive means of obtaining consent, with a tagged declarative statement of intent followed up with a polar request for confirmation [76]. Having successfully set up the activity, PO shifts topic to the body-worn video recording, with the lack of transitional marker creating the effect of subsuming the photograph within his wider institutional duties.

The officer employs similar strategies in Extract 4 to prepare the AV for the photograph, now incorporating non-verbal cues to progress his aim. With the transitional marker ‘righto’ in line 1, PO shifts position to orient his body more directly towards AV2, pre-empting the change in formation that will be required for the photograph. Similarly, his action of standing up combines with a final confirmation check in line 5 to steer the interaction in the desired direction. However, the officer eases the transition by initiating an insertion sequence which draws the focus back to AV2’s needs, marking his wellbeing as a priority with the contrastive ‘though’ (line 5–7). The shift here from institutional ‘we’ to the emphatic ‘you’ displays PO’s continued attentiveness as he reconfigures the interactional space to accommodate the new task. Although AV2 signals his cooperation using nods and affirmative responses, he remains seated, indicating that he has not yet aligned with PO’s embodied transition into the photograph activity, in which talk will be secondary to action. Therefore, despite the care with which PO signposts the upcoming shift, AV2 is afforded a degree of control over how and when it unfolds. The resulting effect of a ‘long run up’ to entering the AV’s personal space contrasts sharply with the disruptive effect of the inspections of AV1 in Extracts 1 and 2. A comparison of the two call-outs also raises the question of the potential influence of victim gender on officers’ approach to such invasive activities.

Shortly afterwards, PO and AV2 complete the photograph along with a further, brief physical inspection. We rejoin the transcript with PO still standing in preparation to take the photograph (as per Extract 4) and AV2 continuing to elaborate on his response to the officer’s query about his wellbeing (‘you alright though?’).

Extract 5

figure e

The passage begins as AV2, still seated while PO is standing, continues to describe some troubles in response to PO’s prior enquiry about his wellbeing, sustaining the narrative function of the interactional space. PO’s evident focus on preparing his phone to take the photograph while AV2 speaks (lines 1–2) perpetuates the slight misalignment that originated in Extract 4 whereby they are orienting to different activities. Despite PO’s expression of affiliation in lines 3–4, his split attention progresses the objective of taking the photograph by signalling the withdrawal of his attention away from AV2 and towards the practicalities of the task. This sequence brings to light the complexities of managing different activities within the same space during call-outs, as compared with a police station with separate rooms for the collection of verbal and physical evidence.

When PO’s embodied effort to move things along is unsuccessful, he applies more pressure to draw AV2 out of narrative mode in lines 4–5. The officer does so non-verbally, putting more distance between them to facilitate the photograph, while the repeated completion markers (‘okay’) hold the floor as he finishes preparing his phone. The subsequent directive to stand is softened by the singular first-person epistemic marker ‘thinking’, which foregrounds PO’s expertise and personal motivation to secure further evidenceFootnote 6 to support the AV’s version of events. At this point, action assumes primacy over talk, as PO begins the activity by raising his phone and then directs AV2’s movements with deictic gesturing in lines 7–11. AV2 displays cooperation by standing up quickly, positioning himself as requested and standing still. The extended silences during this sequence contrast with what has been a steady flow of talk between them so far during this call-out, but PO involves AV2 in the activity with the positive appraisal ‘perfect’ (line 8) and characterisation of the injury (line 13). As with the ‘crap’ on AV1’s face in Extract 2, the verbal interjections here do relational work by diffusing the potential awkwardness of the silence and camera clicks. Both participants, therefore, collaborate in temporarily repurposing the interactional space for the collection of visual instead of verbal evidence. PO’s completion marker in line 14 prompts AV2 to immediately relax his body from his rigid pose, displaying his alignment with the officer’s transition out of the photograph activity.

A key observation emerging from lines 1–14 is the effect of the officer’s transitional work on the AV’s behaviour. Because PO prepares AV2 for the photograph in advance, the AV cooperates with what is an expected process—as embodied by his physical adjustments (e.g. lines 7 and 9). By contrast, in Extract 1 (line 7), AV1’s reflexive response to the unexpected torchlight, which makes her turn her head away quickly, is interpretable as a lapse in cooperation. The contrast between the two scenarios indicates a direct correlation between the degree of care taken to prepare AVs for physical aspects of the call-out and the degree to which AVs appear to cooperate with the police during the process. This impression of cooperation is evidentially relevant because AV behaviour is documented for the record in the body-worn video footage and, in AV2’s case, in the smartphone photographs. It is important to acknowledge that in this analysis, both AVs are generally cooperative while officers enter their personal physical space. Nonetheless, the differences of approach identified here highlight the potential evidential impact of officers’ efforts to prepare AVs for these moments. This correlation is reflected in the ‘Ground Rules’ guidelines for formal investigative interviews with vulnerable and intimidated witnesses [69: 79], which emphasise that interviewers must outline and explain what is about to happen, to assuage witnesses’ natural fear of “the unexpected”.

While AV1 experienced the objectification of physical proximity in Extracts 1 and 2, there is a less tangible form of intrusion to consider in the process of photographing AV2’s injury in Extract 5. Whereas in AV1’s case, the physical inspection reduced the participation framework according to the proximal intimacy between participants, in AV2’s case the participation structure expands to include potential future viewers of the photograph. PO’s efforts to manoeuvre AV2’s head according to visibility in the camera frame amount to the ‘frontstage entextualisation’ [80] of evidence. This process displays the officer’s preservation of visual evidence and thus foregrounds the overarching influence of institutional procedure (and its associated actors) to direct movement within the AV’s realm during the call-out. In this way, the visual modality of evidence photographs constitutes a clear manifestation of the institutional encroachment into the private sphere. Less clear is the preservation of visual evidence via the omnipresent body-worn camera, which is framed in police guidelines as a frontstage ‘overt recording device’ [11], but which officers may nonetheless foreground (as per Extract 3) or background discursively during call-outs.

PO’s management of the photograph activity so far has demonstrated some ways in which the intrusion of entering a victim’s personal space can be mitigated. When he facilitates a joint viewing of the photograph (Extract 5, lines 13 and 14), the officer includes AV2 in the process of entextualising evidence and reduces the epistemic gradient by giving him access to what future viewers will see. This embodied display of collaboration goes some way towards bridging the gap between the private and institutional realms. As with ‘thinking’ earlier, the informality of PO’s assessment that it is ‘only a tiny scratch’ personalises his engagement with the evidence and backgrounds the official categorisation process it will undergo (beginning with the officer’s report). The information-sharing formation entailed by the joint viewing [93] indexes their collaboration and provides relief from the objectification of the AV within the prior photography formation. PO thereby deemphasises the institutional nature of the evidence collection process, as is borne out in his subsequent proposal (line 19) that AV2 check himself for further injuries. At the same time, the officer’s reduction of the large facial cut to ‘only a tiny scratch’ amounts to a downgrading of violence, aligning with the collegial tone of this encounter that conjures cultural codes of traditional masculinity.

Unlike the photograph, the brief inspection sequence in Extract 5 (lines 17–23) is not set up in advance and instead emerges from the topic of the facial injury. However, the levity with which AV2 treats the self-inspection from line 19 reflects the freedom he is afforded by the officer in this regard. As with AV1’s inspection in Extract 2, the exchange of laughter here offsets the awkwardness of their prolonged focus on AV2’s body. However, a comparison between the two moments reveals a crucial difference in the source of laughter:

From Extract 2 (AV1)

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From Extract 5 (AV2)

figure g

Whereas in Extract 2, AV1 treated the officer’s comment on her streaked face as a laughable and reacted accordingly, in Extract 5 it is AV2 who produces the laughable, with a pantomime that derives humour from PO’s suggestion to ‘have a check’. PO does not treat this as a transgression, instead joining in with laughter particles in line 19 which emphasise his acceptance (‘aw okay’) of AV2’s mock assessment (see also [40]). Glenn [27: 1497] observes that the “move to bring participants together through shared laughter may also be a move that marks asymmetry” and that this asymmetry inheres in the direction of the laughter either “at or with an interlocutor”. AV1’s direction of laughter towards herself in Extract 2 defuses the tense situation but does so at her own expense, amplifying the objectification of the physical inspection. While the officer’s responding laughter in line 15 further relieves the tension, he might have combined this with reassurance instead of continuing his evaluation of her face. A reassurance would counter the self-deprecation underpinning AV1’s laugh by validating her right to freely express emotion and, by extension, would acknowledge the emotional impact of the suspect’s behaviour. By contrast, in Extract 5 AV2 directs his laughter towards PO’s suggestion that he check himself, in line with the negotiation of spatial control that has characterised the photograph activity. Participants’ organisation of laughter during these sequences therefore reflects their “ongoing understandings of the constraints and obligations of their roles” [27: 1497] (see further [41]).

The demarcation of the photograph from their prior talk necessitates a transition out of the activity in Extract 5. PO does so by signalling his intention to depart, remaining standing while AV2 sits back down and reverting from laughing to normal voice for the completion marker in line 23. The preparation evident in Extracts 3 and 4 indicate that PO planned the photograph as a final on-site task prior to departing, a sequential positioning that causes minimal disruption to the AV’s narrative. The relative disruptiveness of AV1’s physical inspection in the first half of this section and AV2’s photograph in the second recalls Ten Have’s [91] ‘ideal sequence’ of medical encounters, wherein physical examination comes after the verbal complaint and before diagnosis. However, as acknowledged earlier, in AV1’s case the officers took advantage of an appropriate opportunity to collect physical evidence, demonstrating how the ad hoc nature of call-outs necessitates some spatially incompatible activities.

5 Summary and Conclusion

It was established earlier that the ‘legitimate intrusion’ [86] of first response overrides a victim’s assumed authority within a setting that is typically associated with their daily life. In the same way, the temporary appropriation of the victim’s body as an evidence source and diagnostic tool overrides their assumed authority within their personal ‘bubble’ of space. Given the unpredictable logistics around safeguarding and other practical duties, first response guidelines recognise that officers have limited control over certain aspects and, in the same way, first response research cannot assume officers’ ability to design their interactional behaviour to the same extent as in a pre-arranged formal interview environment. Equally, victims have less control during call-outs than in formal settings, in which they would have a designated space with a controlled environment and special measures to soften the traumatic potential of being physically examined. As demonstrated by this study, first response power relations are determined by how participants interactionally manage their limited control over how these encounters unfold on a moment-to-moment basis. Jucker and colleagues [50: 86] conceptualise space as “an interactive and performative achievement rather than a contextual given”, and analysis has revealed how officers’ advancement into victims’ personal space requires speakers to (re-)negotiate control in relation to the mutually constitutive triad of talk, embodied action and interactional space.

In both case studies analysed, the officers displayed awareness of victims’ potential sensitivity to proximity and touch and mitigated this with interactional work to assign the AVs a sense of agency, involving them to differing extents in collaborative, staged processes. In AV1’s case, the wider studyFootnote 7 found that officers’ delicacy with her body space contrasted with their coercive treatment elsewhere of the wider setting (her home). This differential approach represents a training opportunity, in that officers’ relative delicacy with physical proximity and touch could be translated into their overall approach to call-out communication. For instance, if the wider setting were conceptualised with the same care as victims’ immediate personal space, this could inform a more victim-centred approach and reduce the potential for traumatic spatial dynamics. When photographing AV2, the officer focused his supportiveness in assigning the AV considerable control over how the activity unfolded, yet in doing so PO involved AV2 in his downgrading of his injury. This dynamic raises questions about the positioning of male victims and officers relative to victimhood and masculinity in the context of first response, echoing previous research on male domestic abuse victims in other contexts (e.g. [8, 15, 22, 38, 75]). Further research into first response interactions with male AVs is needed to explore these linkages, but the observations raised here highlight the potential for officers’ discursive choices to perpetuate the sociocultural assumptions and gendered interactional norms that may prevent male AVs from reporting in the first place. A related avenue for further research is to compare approaches between officers of different genders, and AV responses to them, as the present analysis has pertained only to inspections led by male officers.

Beyond gender distribution, another key difference between the two case studies was in the sequential staging of physical evidence-gathering, and the related degree of transitional work done by officers. Analysis demonstrated how these action-focused activities of inspection and photography involve reconfiguring the interactional space in a way that is maximally disruptive to an emerging account of the reported incident. AV1’s injury inspection arose naturally from her narrative, which was thereby disrupted by the shift in activity, whereas in AV2’s case the officer planned and executed the injury photographs as a final activity. The sequencing of such activities therefore establishes the status of the victim’s verbal evidence relative to the officers’ quest for physical evidence. This study has thus highlighted that a more systematic approach to the timing of physical inspections should be incorporated into officer training, given the potential for victim disorientation and distress and the impact on the verbal evidence. Such an approach creates space for first responders to prepare victims with signposting to transition into physical activities, and analysis has indicated a correlation between victims’ preparedness for these activities and the degree to which they appear cooperative and comfortable with the procedures.

The study has also foregrounded that ways in which the activities of inspecting and photographing injuries both place victims in an exposed position as a ‘body of evidence’. While the physical inspection brought the officer into AV1’s immediate personal space, the photograph had the objectifying effect of foregrounding AV2’s position relative to future viewers of the photograph. The objectification required by the primacy of visual evidence therefore also brings to light the exposure of AVs’ private realms via body-worn camera, which the partner force (and most others throughout the UK) mandate that officers turn on for domestic abuse incidents. The video footage preserves for the official record not only evidence, but many other aspects of AVs’ lifeworlds. The wealth of additional information transmitted via call-out settings contrasts with the depersonalising environment of formal police interview rooms. While police stations are far from neutral, with the setting structured to reinforce communicative norms, private and semi-private settings are equally loaded with evocative potential in their ‘visible ecology’ [59: 367]. Given the diversity of visual information in the footage obtained for the wider project,Footnote 8 it is worth questioning the influence of this information on future viewers’ evaluations of the AV and their story. While viewing the AV in their ‘natural habitat’ can create compelling evidence which invites empathy through personalisation, the meanings transmitted by visible sociodemographic and lifestyle markers will position certain AVs more favourably than others (see also [3]), reflecting Pfitzner and colleagues’ assessment of body-worn video as a “double-edged sword” [78: 13] (see also e.g. [31]). The role of the body-worn camera therefore contributes to the sociodemographic positioning of AVs relative to the evidence being produced during call-outs, inviting the ideological assumptions of future audiences into the AV’s private sphere. First response guidelines instruct officers to remain vigilant for “signs of disturbance” and evidence of coercive control in the AV’s environs [12]. Although such guidance is motivated by the need for supporting evidence, it nonetheless highlights the fact that the body-worn footage gives the institution indefinite access to the AV’s territory. The officers’ freedom to move around the AV’s space compounds the power embedded in their role as the video producers. The footage may be recontextualised further along in the legal process, but attending officers retain moment-by-moment control over what is captured for the record, typifying the processes of production, distribution and consumption that drive the reproduction of institutional power [24].

Police forces across the UK continue to face an uphill struggle in implementing the changes dictated by the police inspectorate and other bodies to improve the police response to domestic abuse [34, 82, 104]. Years of government cuts to police funding have left forces increasingly overstretched, exacerbated by the pressure of policing during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond (e.g. [6, 85, 97]). The success of specialist domestic abuse first response training is contingent on a significant majority of the relevant frontline officers participating [34: 25, 83], but with forces unable to invest sufficiently, the goal of having a specially trained officer attending every incident is unattainable for most, including the force represented in this research. By exploring a prominent dimension of first response practice which is characterised by both communicative complexity and evidential import, this paper provides a point of departure for follow-on research involving a greater diversity of case studies, taking into account the spatial and embodied repercussions of pandemic-era social distancing (see [21]). As such, the study serves the continuing aim of converting findings about first response interaction into targeted training to improve officers’ ability to gather evidence and support vulnerable victims who reach out for help.

6 Transcription Conventions

 + :

Indicates co-occurring action

action:

Actions occurring during and between turns

(.):

Just noticeable pause

(2.1):

Timed pause (in seconds)

{sniffs}:

Non-verbal and extra-linguistic information.

[speech]:

Overlapping talk

[[speech]]:

Additional participant overlapping

.hh:

Inbreath

hh:

Outbreath

.hih/huh:

Voiced inbreath (when sobbing)

hih/hih:

Voiced outbreath (when sobbing)

but-:

Sharp cut-off

yea:h:

Sound preceding colon is stretched

(something):

Unclear speech (best guess/number of syllables)

turn = ; = turn:

Latching; no discernible pause between two turns

 > quick < :

Faster speech

°quiet°:

Quieter speech

°°whisper°°:

Whispering

 ~ upset ~ :

Wobbly voice

#distress#:

Sobbing voice

@funny@:

‘Laughing’ voice

emphasis:

Emphasised word/syllable

?:

Question intonation

.:

Full stop intonation

(PO: yeah):

Minimal feedback within other speaker’s turn