Police Behavior in Post-Conflict States: Explaining Variation in Responses to Domestic Violence, Internal Human Trafficking, and Rape

Security sector reform programs restructure police forces to improve how they respond to gender-based violence (GBV). However, significant weaknesses persist in how police officers enforce anti-GBV laws. One area of weakness is the attrition of cases; officers fail to refer the majority of cases to the courts but rather withdraw them at the police station. Studies of police behavior in post-conflict African states have attributed the withdrawal of cases to corruption, poor professionalism, patriarchal gender norms, and underequipped police forces. Though salient, these conditions do not adequately explain police responses to GBV crimes. Even in police stations with the most poorly trained, corrupt, underequipped, and biased officers, a small number of cases advance to court. This dissertation investigates this puzzle by studying officers’ responses to domestic violence, internal human trafficking, and rape in two Liberian counties. While officers withdraw over 50 percent of domestic violence and internal human trafficking cases, they withdraw less than five percent of rape cases every year. This study employs 150 interviews with officers of the Women and Children Protection Section (WACPS) as well as survivors of violence, bureaucrats, and staff of international organizations (IOs) and local women’s nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to explain this disparity. It finds that officers are more likely to refer rape cases to court because they perceive rape as an offense that is above the jurisdiction of the police and because the WACPS enforces a non-withdrawal policy for rape cases. This perception is a product of training provided by state and non-state actors; the stature of the crime in the penal law; and the WACPS’ policies. This study also finds that when these two conditions do not exist, officers sometimes forward cases to court based on their judgments of the victim and of the effects of the crime on the victim. It argues that the state, IOs, and NGOs have prioritized sexual violence and emphasized the prosecution of sexual offenders through legal and policy changes, institution building, and awareness-raising, to the relative neglect of other forms of GBV. This disparity has contributed to the variation in how officers respond to GBV.