Parental Defenses in Interactions with the Police

Abstract

Decades of stigma research has shown that people draw on different coping strategies to manage stigma in their daily lives. Yet, scholar have paid less attention to how people deal with and manage feelings of stigma as they arise in ongoing interactions. Drawing on observations of police‐parent interactions, in this study I identify four common ways that parents of young offenders respond to police interventions: compliance, passivity, minimization of severity, and defensive attacks. I discuss how these parental responses shape and change the interactional dynamics between police and parents, and how they simultaneously may help the parents protect and regulate their sense of parental identity in interaction. Finally, although the stigma defenses I identify are based on police‐parent interactions, I conclude that the same responses may be found in other relatable fields and interactions.