Reaching a Fuller Picture of the Perceived “Need” of Police and Contexts Surrounding Women’s Formal Reporting for Intimate Partner Violence

Commending the use of the Empowerment Process Model (EPM) and considering the Transformative Racial Equity Framework (TREF), this letter to the editor responds to Qiu and colleagues’ (2023) study. The authors provide a fuller picture of women’s formal help-seeking behavior regarding police contact in instances of intimate partner violence (IPV) by replacing a binary measure of police contact with the frequency of police contact to provide better insight into the dynamics and contexts of IPV. However, this picture is not complete; in this letter, we propose building upon this measure to better understand the context-specifics of IPV.

In reviewing Qiu et al.’s manuscript, we critically consider the measures utilized.

This letter aims to contribute to an important methodological discussion that Qiu and colleagues (2023) raise by empowering participants to define what ‘needing the police’ and other avenues of help following instances of IPV mean during data collection and by creating a measure that specifies contexts of abuse.

The authors make contributions to the core challenge of quantifying and operationalizing social constructs within IPV and family violence research; however, it is critical to continue to examine the measures used in addition to exploring survivor needs outside of the criminal legal system.