Police Burnout and Attitudes to Women and Domestic Violence

Review: Burnout is comprised of 3 factors emotional exhaustion, lowered personal achievement and depersonalisation. The literature suggests lower rates of depersonalisation burnout amongst women human services workers. Depersonalisation is the development of negative attitudes, such as cynicism and negativism, in which coworkers and service recipients are labelled in derogatory ways and treated accordingly. The literature also demonstrates that attitudes to women contribute to attitudes to domestic violence. It was theorised that depersonalisation burnout may contribute to approval of domestic violence. Method: Burnout and attitudes to women and domestic violence were measured by selfreport in 133 Queensland women police and 602 men police. Results: Police had similar amounts of emotional exhaustion to other human service groups. However, police reported high personal achievement but had more depersonalisation burnout than other human services groups. Women police did not differ in emotional exhaustion and depersonalisation burnout from men, but had higher levels of personal achievement. Women police, lower ranked police and those with lower levels of alcohol use had significantly more favourable attitudes to women. Police attitudes to domestic violence were measured. After review of a domestic violence vignette, women police disapproved of the husband's physical abuse more than men police. Additionally, they also had higher level of disapproval of verbal abuse after refusal of sex by the wife. They also rated controlling (cf. overtly coercive) behaviours as more serious and disagreed more strongly than male police with the myth that "its hard to understand why women stay in violent relationships". Conclusions :