Reports of domestic violence: transcripts from 10 UK/US emergency calls

Transcripts from 10 publicly available recorded emergency calls reporting domestic violence in the US and UK, collected and transcribed by Scarlett Vaughan MSc. Transcripts use the transcription system developed by Hepburn and Bolden (2017) and Jefferson (2004).Hepburn, A., & Bolden, G. B. (2017). Transcribing for Social Research. SAGE Publications Ltd. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781473920460Jefferson, G. (2004). Glossary of transcript symbols with an introduction (pp. 13–31). https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.125.02jefArticle abstractDomestic violence (DV) is widespread with devastating consequences, and emergency calls serve as a vital link between victims and potential help. Conversation analytic studies provide key insights into the organisation of such calls, how requests for help are provided, solicited, and responded to. An emerging scholarship on calls reporting domestic violence provides systematic descriptions of how callers and call takers collaboratively adapt their talk to keep the emergency nature of the call covert from a co-present perpetrator. However, these calls focus predominantly on caller’s narratives - the production and negotiation of multiple and contesting narratives (e.g. the caller’s and the perpetrator’s) remain unexplored.We subjected a corpus of 10 emergency calls collected from publicly available sources to conversation analysis and discursive psychology. The findings document how DV events are described in initial requests for help. We focus on one unique case study of call where the perpetrator becomes fully engaged with the call taker, revealing how parties manage competing accounts of events, and the subsequent challenges for the call taker in delivering their institutional responsibilities to keep the caller safe and optimise the enforcement response by convincing the perpetrator to remain on site. This paper extends important work on how DV is reported and responded to in emergency calls and develops new understanding of how callers and call handlers manage the presence of a perpetrator, conflicting descriptions of events, and attributions of blame and responsibility, providing an interactional lens on matters that sit squarely at the core of domestic violence.