Perpetrators use controlling and harassing behaviours including financial limits, repeated communications and restricting social connections to deny their partners’ autonomy and independence.
The Bocsar executive director, Jackie Fitzgerald, said the use of a text-mining computer model meant researchers were able to analyse more reports and better understand the complexities in domestic violence situations. “[Police reports] are actually quite lengthy documents [that] go into quite a bit of detail about the circumstances of the crime, but the fact that it’s written in text makes it hard to analyse,” she said. “So, we’ve applied a text mining methodology to those narrative descriptions to look for coercive control behaviours.”
She said there were still some instances in which police “describe something that is akin to stalking, intimidation” but do not characterise it as such, and it has then been flagged by the AI model. She expected police to start pinpointing more of these behaviours when the legislation comes into effect next year.
“Police take considerable time to write and document what happens in these offences – this gives a way for it to build on our general understanding of crime,” she said.