Legal Vulnerability – Police Officers’ Stories in Their Meeting with People with Intellectual Disabilities

Recruitment

Recruitment took place by direct approach via e-mail to coordinators in the field of domestic violence and sexual abuse in each Norwegian police district, using the police email system. Coordinators received information about the study and were invited to participate voluntarily. The study includes 11 coordinators in eight of the 12 police districts.

Participants

The coordinators are police officers who have ‘coordinating responsibility for the police districts` overall efforts to reduce domestic violence and sexual abuse’ (Norwegian Police Directorate 2002: 2). They were chosen because they monitor the flow of cases and offer guidance to other police officers in the field (Hoel & Moen 2023). Coordinators have long experience in investigation in the field of violence and abuse.

Data collection

This study is part of a PhD project with an overall problem position about police officers’ experience of people with intellectual disabilities in domestic violence and sexual abuse cases. Therefore, the database will be similar to that of a previous study (Hoel & Moen 2023). A two-part semi-structured interview guide was developed. The first part concerned a narrative from a case in which people with intellectual disabilities were subjected to abuse. The second part was about the coordinator role and experiences from this. The interviews were conducted between August 2020 and March 2021, six over the telephone because of the COVID pandemic and five at the interviewees’ place of work. The interviews were recorded and transcribed.

Data

Data used in this study come from the coordinators’ narratives from experiences with cases they recall, where people with intellectual disabilities were involved. The coordinators had knowledge about the persons’ disabilities in these cases. Some of the coordinators related more than one experience. They reported on a total of 18 cases.

Ethics

The study was approved by the Norwegian Centre for Research Data (NSD). Participants received written information about the study and signed a consent form before participating in the study. The audio files and personal data were stored on a secure hard drive at first authors workplace. Personal data were not recorded on the audio files. There are few people working as coordinators in this field, and there is a gender misbalance, with women being overrepresented. To safeguard the informants’ anonymity, their direct statements are without gender and identified by a single letter; geographic data have been omitted and identifiers from their stories omitted or paraphrased.

Data analysis

Data analysis was inspired by Tjora’s (2018) Stepwise-Deductive Induction (SDI) method. This method is particularly well-suited to generalising data by means of feedback loops between theory and data, ensuring analytic, generalised and valid knowledge (Tjora 2018).

The interviews were first read to form an overall impression of the data. The data were then coded with ‘text derived codes’ (Tjora 2018). This inductive process led to the development of 43 codes not straying far from the empirical data. Examples of ‘text derived codes’ are: ‘Verbally fluent and looking like everyone else, but mixed up times and episodes’, ‘Unable to say no, leads her to do whatever she is asked’.

The next step was to analyse these codes and group them into thematic categories. The categories were named: People with intellectual disabilities and ‘pleasing’; Credibility; Retelling incidents; How the disability is apparent; Dismantling barriers in encounters with the police; and Hidden disabilities/categorisations. Of the six categories, we worked with these three: People with intellectual disabilities and ‘pleasing’, Credibility and Retelling incidents.

Next, we used theory more actively to understand and interpret the categories, alternating between the theory and the empirical work. In this phase, we were inspired by Goffman’s theory of the interaction order (Goffman 1983) and the concept of legal vulnerability (Kim et al. 2022; Biggs & Jones 2014), and these theoretical perspectives aided in the identification of five main themes. These themes became: 1) Self-determination and social norms in conflict, 2) Failure to interpret and understand the interaction, 3) Biddable despite having reservations, 4) Language skills and social categorisation, and 5) Different understandings and expectations in an investigative interview. According to Tjora (2018: 73), the SDI method is a strategy for escaping quote-hunting qualitative ideas; therefore, our results will contain less empirical evidence. We try to print out / describe the empirical data and illustrate the content with few quotes.

Strengths and weaknesses

The strength of this study is that it draws on real-world stories from police practice. The coordinators shedding light on this theme come, geographically, from the whole country and represent both urban and rural settings. Reproducible qualitative methodology has been utilised, informed by a clear theoretical framework. The weakness is that these are stories from brief interactions told from the coordinators’ memory and so possibly contain errors or are subject to recall bias. A review of the interviews showed many open-ended questions, with the participants giving long answers containing stories with much detail, and this is a strength. Interviews are, in general, an uncertain source of information about circumstances outside the interview situation (Silverman 2017). However, concrete histories bound by a procedural logic are often a better source because they are more difficult to manipulate (Silverman 2017).

Self-determination and social norms in conflict

The coordinators’ stories showed that some people with intellectual disabilities might, in many situations, be insecure in their encounters with others. Several coordinators imply that they may act in a way they believe to be expected of them. They say that people with intellectual disabilities are often alone in interactions with others, and that this can make them vulnerable to abuse. Following several reforms, people with intellectual disabilities have gained more right to social participation and to make independent choices (Sandvin 2014). However, family, carers or group-home staff may not agree with, accept or understand some of the decisions they make.

The conflict between a person’s self-determination and social norms is exemplified by a coordinator talking about a woman with an intellectual disability who believed it to be nice that people came to visit and have sex with her. The group-home staff where she lived believed she was being abused due to her intellectual disability. Such dilemmas are constantly in play, as is the question of where to draw the line between self-determination and group-home staff’s obligation or desire to protect from harm. They violate her degree of self-determination, as shown by the following quotation.

Coordinator ‘G’ stated:

The last time she came, it was: ‘I have sex with whoever I like’. She wasn`t happy that someone had reported this to the police on her behalf.

The behaviour the coordinators speak about may not – according to the way of thinking of the group-home staff or the coordinators – be socially acceptable. Their stories show the dilemmas surrounding the blurred boundary between the self-determination of people with intellectual disabilities and their risk of being exposed to actions adversely affecting their life and health. What the person with an intellectual disability believes to be acceptable conflicts with the group-home staff’s understanding and with the coordinator’s understanding of the legal situation.

In Goffman’s (2014) role-playing game, one seeks to be accepted by others and wants to appear as an ideal version of oneself, and, according to the interaction order, all social interaction is rooted in the preconditions of social life (Goffman 1983: 3). We understand the term ‘preconditions of social life’ as social norms, and, in the above example of a woman with an intellectual disability inviting people home for sex, she is violating the social norms regulating the interaction order. An interpretation of Goffman’s (2004) interaction order in this context is that people with intellectual disabilities may not recognise or understand how to behave, or how to expect visitors to behave, when they are invited to someone’s home. They struggle in the role-playing game in social situations like this, and their role, the role of others and social norms come into conflict.

Difficulties arising between self-determination and limited understanding of social norms may be exacerbated by a lack of general knowledge and impaired language and communication skills. According to Sandvin (2014), today’s society is founded on knowledge and information, and people with intellectual disabilities may face challenges due to their cognitive impairments and the gap between their abilities and society’s expectations. Hence, people with intellectual disabilities may not have sufficient skills to secure their own interests in what Goffman (2004) describes as an order of face-to-face interaction.

Failure to interpret and understand the interaction

In the coordinators’ stories, one of the challenges people with intellectual disabilities met in their interaction with others was that they readily did what others asked without questioning why. These stories concerned others taking advantage of people with intellectual disabilities in one way or another, and it appeared that they rarely resisted. Several coordinators talked about how some had difficulty in asserting themselves. One example is illustrated by a coordinator describing how a person was being exploited by a woman, and how the coordinator tried to guide him to avoid this.

Coordinator ‘L’ recounted:

So, a lot went into equipping him to set boundaries, not letting himself be used and… In those circumstances it was simply right to just block a woman who was bothering him a great deal.

A second example was told to us by another coordinator – ‘A’:

She has problems in opposing anything, and if – for example – she is asked to buy alcohol, she just does. If she’s told to take her clothes off, she just does.

To do things for others as described in these quotations may reflect that people with intellectual disabilities do not understand these situations and how to handle such interactions. Our interpretation is that some people with intellectual disability lack the necessary skills to handle requests or to understand the consequences of cooperating in these situations.

In accordance with Goffman’s (2004) interaction order, the individual’s task is to create a joint focus of the situation. It appears from the first quote that the person did not understand or have the ability to share a joint focus or create a common understanding between himself and the woman. In the absence of a common understanding, the interaction ends in him experiencing himself as being harassed. According to the interaction order, he finds it challenging to handle his responsibility to create a common understanding in the face-to-face interaction. A reason for this might be his intellectual disability. Research has shown that limited assertiveness and reduced cognition influence language and communication skills and may result in situations where people accept or agree without understanding the short- or long-term consequences of doing so (Finlay & Lyons 2002). Wanting to be accepted by peers and included is commonly proposed in the literature as a reason why people with intellectual disabilities are exposed to dangerous situations (Lutzker et al. 2016; Snell et al. 2009). Another perspective is that everyone may be vulnerable in human interaction (Goffman 1983). By participating in human interaction, we reveal our personal-territory contingencies and can thereby become victims of what Goffman calls ‘coercive exchange’, described as a ‘tacit bargain between cooperation with the aggressor in exchange for the promise of not being harmed as much as our circumstances allow’ (Goffman 1983: 4). The above quotations exemplify how people with intellectual disabilities become vulnerable to ‘coercive exchange’ in interaction with others. However, in these examples and in other stories told by the coordinators, it seems that people with intellectual disabilities readily cooperate, and the tacit bargain described by Goffman is not present. For a person who is unable to take part in or understand such a situation, protecting themselves from harm is difficult. Additionally, people with intellectual disabilities are often excluded in different social contexts; many want to be included, therefore offering a lot to be accepted and liked by others (Sandvin 2014; Snell et al. 2009). Snell et al. (2009; 226) discuss the phenomenon that people with intellectual disabilities can often be fooled, tricked and lied to and therefore taken advantage of and talked into doing things without understanding the consequences.

Biddable despite having reservations

Several of the coordinators’ stories indicate that people with intellectual disabilities were easily persuadable and did not state a clear ‘no’ to things they did not want to do. If they resisted, they had difficulty in maintaining their decision, often giving in to pressure. In terms of being easy to persuade, the coordinators indicate that people with intellectual disabilities are vulnerable in two ways: one is that they run a higher risk of being abused or exploited. The other is that if they do not give a clear ‘no’, or offer resistance in other ways, it becomes difficult for the police, in terms of the law, to establish that they had not wanted this to happen.

Coordinator ‘F’ described a person with intellectual disability trying hard to say no to some boys who wanted to come to her place and have sex with her, but, in the end, she did not resist:

Like the one who says he wants to have sex with her, wants her to be a dog and things like that, and she says she doesn’t really want to do that.

The experience of another coordinator (A) was that, if a clear ‘no’ was not stated, others were free to take advantage:

But since she hasn’t mastered the art of saying no, and setting boundaries, she just has to allow herself to be exploited.

Based on the coordinators’ stories, our impression is that, even though some people with intellectual disabilities tried to resist, they were nonetheless easy to persuade or convince. Their attempts to say no were rejected, and, in some of the coordinators’ stories, the implication was that people with intellectual disabilities did not resist because they had experienced being ignored, discriminated against and disrespected. The quotations indicate that people with intellectual disabilities were sexually abused because they were unable to escape abusive situations or simply just gave up. Such scenarios, where people with intellectual disabilities are exploited may, according to the coordinators’ stories, never be investigated due to lack of resistance or ambiguities related to consent. In accordance with Goffman’s interaction order, the stories about being easy to persuade could, among others, depend on two things. The first is that people with intellectual disabilities did not understand when someone was misleading them, which may be explained by the way they encounter and identify a person in a face-to-face interaction (Goffman 2014). Due to impairments or social experience, they may not be able to categorise a potential perpetrator. Perhaps even more crucial may be their lack of ability to identify themselves from a perpetrator’s viewpoint: namely as belonging within a social category of possible victims. The second might be that they lack the necessary skills to close an interaction and to understand if or when they are being exploited (Goffman 2004). Goffman (2014: 59) describes the act of those trying to exploit and mislead others as misleading behaviour, making it difficult for a person to distinguish between true and false impressions. According to Goffman (2004), the interaction order can be used in a strategic manner with the intention of misleading others to obtain specific benefits, as described in the coordinators’ quotations. Snell et al. (2009: 226) support an understanding of people with intellectual disabilities as vulnerable to being victimised, as many do not see or understand the finer points, nuances or subtlety of complex social situations or behaviour. As described earlier, limited self-assertion may lead a person to do things they do not understand the consequences of. At the same time, limited self-assertion will also make a person easier to persuade. In a recent study, Chopin et al. (2023) described offenders as often being known to the disabled victim and using deception to approach their target, and their victims as being unlikely to resist. The above quotations are examples of people with intellectual disabilities quickly giving up on saying no, and, according to Snell et al. (2009), this might be because they believe or agree to what someone says with little or no question. People with intellectual disabilities may be overly trusting of others and easy to mislead (Snell et al. 2009), particularly by those persons intent on strategically violating Goffman’s interaction order.

Language skills and social categorisation

In the coordinators’ stories, they talk about their experiences of understanding what people with intellectual disabilities are reporting in their accounts of abusive incidents. It also emerged that the coordinators had a prior understanding of people with intellectual disabilities, leading to categorisation.

This is evident from the coordinators’ narratives, exemplified in this quotation, where the person with an intellectual disability did not, during an investigative interview, get the opportunity to say what had happened. The police decided that this was because of her intellectual disability and that she was unable to fully recount the story.

Coordinator ‘D’:

An older woman had been hit by a bus. She had a intellectual disability, making it impossible to question her because she was unable to fully recount the story.

Coordinator ‘D’ had one more experience with another person, where there was a disparity gap between information that was given and other information that came to light during the investigation:

She might say that ‘mother bit me here and then put on a band aid’ and there is ketchup and mustard underneath. And you understand there is something. But then it becomes so difficult to grasp fully what it actually is and what is just extraneous information that doesn’t add up.

This is what coordinator ‘H’ experienced during an investigative interview:

When I questioned her, she mixed up times and episodes and was unable to distinguish one day from another. And that makes it very complicated.

Our understanding of the coordinators’ challenges in these situations is the difficulty of relating to information that did not fit together and based on this, assessing which information should carry most weight. We interpret the quotes to mean that people with intellectual disabilities may be judged based on their appearance, behaviour and language abilities, leaving their stories to be difficult to take into account, limiting their opportunity to speak about their experiences. Seemingly, the police have little knowledge of people with intellectual disabilities, or perhaps the knowledge is derived from prejudiced opinions of their accountability (Moen 2023; Olsen et al. 2018). Lack of knowledge and prejudiced opinions may lead to failure to understand the difficulties people with intellectual disabilities encounter in an investigative interview, which, in turn, creates vulnerability.

One characteristic of people with intellectual disabilities may be limited language and communication skills (Carr et al. 2007). Problems with re-telling are related to difficulties with cognitive processes linked to memory (Henry 2001). This concerns skills such as organising and planning the information being recalled (Baddeley 2003). When people with intellectual disabilities are unable to recount, this makes the investigation in cases of violence and abuse difficult because, often, in such cases, there is little or no other evidence (Åker 2023; Kousomanen & Starke 2013; Pipe et al. 2007). How one expresses oneself then becomes evidentially important.

In a face-to-face interaction, the actors are considering each other, and a sorting takes place, based on their appearance and manner (Goffmann 1983: 3). As we interpret aspects of the interaction order, in this sorting process, how you speak or express yourself may affect how your partner in the interaction perceives your social status and relationship (Goffmann 1983: 3). As Goffman stated, you can facilitate, or change, your social status most effectively through speech, and, during an investigative interview, where verbal language abilities are crucial, people with intellectual disabilities may not have sufficient skills to shape the initial impression. Therefore, what is called a categoric kind of identification may be formed from the prejudiced opinions held about people falling into this category (Goffman 1983). Prejudicial opinions about people with intellectual disabilities may be that they are less reliable and trustworthy than people without an intellectual disability (Eadens et al. 2016). The quotations presented earlier in this section may indicate that people with intellectual disabilities are placed in a specific category, and that the interaction is influenced by how speech and language affect this face-to-face interaction. Consequently, people with intellectual disabilities lose the communicative game in the sorting process due to, for example, difficulties in expressing themselves and prejudiced understandings of what the police know, or think they know, about a person with an intellectual disability.

Different understandings and expectations in an investigative interview

Some coordinators commonly described their experience of the difficulty that people with intellectual disabilities had in elaborating and explaining the incident they had experienced. This was often related to the coordinator’s role as a police officer conducting investigative interviews. In many ways, the coordinators stated that the lack of verbal communication and expressive language skills was a way for them to confirm and understand the diagnosis, intellectual disability, as illustrated in this quotation:

Coordinator ‘H’ said:

What I’ve experienced many times is that someone is verbally capable when they’re speaking freely, but the problems start when they have to elaborate; you then find that the diagnoses are correct.

Another topic reflected in this theme was the coordinators’ emphasis on the lack of details in the accounts of people with intellectual disabilities, and how they struggled to understand these stories when important details were missing or left out. The coordinators said that they worked hard to try to help them to provide a more detailed story, as is exemplified by one coordinator (I):

There was very little… there were very few details at the beginning, and I had to ask a lot to just sort of get a better picture of it.

Several coordinators saw the lack of detail in the accounts of people with intellectual disabilities as a challenge and referred to the legal requirements if the case were to be moved forward to a court hearing. An interpretation of the coordinators’ emphasis on the inability of people with intellectual disabilities to convey details might be related to the fact that, in cases of violence and sexual abuse, there is often little or no other evidence besides the investigative interview (Åker 2023; Pipe et al. 2007). Therefore, it is crucial that, if details are revealed in an investigative interview, they must correspond with other information that is available, which will provide a greater degree of reliability, essential in a court hearing (Fahsing & Rachlew 2015). However, providing a statement with a sufficient level of detail is demanding for people with intellectual disabilities (Brown et al. 2018).

This can also be interpreted as a mismatch between the expectations the coordinators have regarding the investigative interview as a communicative situation and the way people with intellectual disabilities understand and elucidate the same situation. Due to differing expectations or knowledge regarding how to interact in an investigative interview, we may assume that the social contract and the social consensus in such a specific face-to-face interaction are broken or perhaps not established. Language abilities and cognition, for example the ability to share a joint focus of attention, are, as Goffman describes it, critical to maintaining the rules of the communication game (Goffman 1983). A person with an intellectual disability may fail to follow these rules, and police officers’ normative preconceptions of the investigative interview and people with intellectual disabilities and their cognitive impairments might challenge what we, in this context, understand as the interaction order. Furthermore, people with intellectual disabilities may lack general knowledge about violence and sexuality and so might not have the vocabulary to describe such incidents (Borawska-Charko et al. 2017; Mikton et al. 2014). If people with intellectual disabilities lack knowledge and vocabulary and have little experience of being interviewed by the police, they may not share a joint focus in this specific situation. Both parties will struggle in an interaction which has failed to establish a common understanding. The person being interviewed will probably not understand what is expected of them, and the police may perceive the information as incorrect or unreliable. Language also has another role, which makes communication in an investigative interview challenging. This is to allow matters outside the specific situation into the collaborative process forming the core topic in an investigative interview (Goffman 1983: 3). Goffman states that to deal with matters beyond the current situation is a forbiddingly complex issue (Goffman 1983: 3). Consequently, as the coordinators state, a common collaborative process during an investigative interview is a major challenge both in the investigative interview and throughout the judicial process.