Examining Offender Characteristics in Police-Recorded Domestic Violence Before and After a Legal Reform

Abstract

Domestic violence often remains a hidden crime. After a reform to the Finnish Penal Code in 2011, the police are now required to investigate petty assaults that occur between intimate partners even without the victim’s consent. In the year following the reform, Finland saw a substantial increase in police-recorded domestic violence. Given that actual levels of domestic violence were unlikely to change so dramatically during this short period, the implication is that the coverage of official data on domestic violence improved. This natural experiment allows one to examine whether the distribution of observed offender characteristics changes when the recorded share of incidents increases abruptly. Prior to the reform, low socioeconomic status and criminal background were known to be relatively strong correlates of police-recorded domestic violence. To find out whether the demographic, socioeconomic, and situational correlates of domestic violence perpetration are sensitive to improvement in outcome coverage, the current study uses a 50% sample ( n = 2,976) of all police-recorded cases of domestic violence during 2010–2011. Despite the significant increase in the share of recorded incidents, our results show very little change in average offender characteristics and do not alter the picture of risk factors associated with domestic violence perpetration.