The second violence: Police responses to family and domestic violence as a public health exposure

This paper contributes to a broader survivor-led program of research on second violence: the institutional reproduction of harm through systems formally designed to respond to violence. Within that broader program, the paper focuses on one police station encounter to examine how police contact can operate as a modifiable public health exposure in family and domestic violence response. : Survivor-led autoethnographic case study. Data were drawn from The Second Violence , a four-year, ethics-approved autoethnographic study documenting lived experience of navigating police and other institutions after separation from an intimate relationship characterised by coercive control and violence. Focusing on a help-seeking episode in which I attended a local police station to report apparent breaches of a Family Violence Intervention Order, I analysed a vignette of this encounter, fieldnotes and analytic memos using feminist autoethnography and Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) to examine how objects of work, rules and division of labour shaped safety outcomes. In this case, police contact operated as a second exposure to harm by intensifying psychological distress through disbelief, minimisation and dismissive institutional responses; delaying safety when patterns of coercive control were not recognised or recorded; leaving risk insufficiently addressed when apparent breaches were not enforced; and eroding trust in systems expected to be protective, with consequences for future help-seeking and engagement with services. This case suggests that violence prevention and public health responses should address not only perpetrators and primary incidents, but also institutional arrangements that may amplify or attenuate harm. Conceptualising policing as a modifiable public health exposure can inform trauma- and violence-informed practice, integrated risk assessment and survivor-led co-design of responses in which “do no further harm” is treated as a core outcome of family violence systems.