Whose security counts? Young women sensemaking of the public security and the police through the policy feedback lens

Details

Supervisors

Dupuy, Claire

Faculty

Faculté des sciences économiques, sociales, politiques et de communication

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences politiques, orientation générale, à finalité approfondie

Abstract

enThis research examines how citizens make sense of the police institution in Belgium, and how this sensemaking shapes their standing as citizens before the state. Grounded in the policy feedback literature, it argues that public security policies do not only regulate behavior but also convey messages about who citizens are, what they deserve, and how legitimate they are in the eyes of the state. While this literature remains largely dominated by American cases, and existing Belgian research on police-citizen relations focuses primarily on trust and procedural justice, this thesis addresses a significant gap by asking how Belgian citizens and particularly women make sense of their safety, the police, and, through it, the state. Drawing on 18 semi-structured interviews conducted with young people and adult public servants in Mons, this research finds that young women's daily exposure to sexual violence, and the perceived underprioritization of these acts by the police, produces a diminished sense of citizenship. This diminished status is further compounded by age, as both formal policy design and informal police discretion construct young citizens as not-yet-full members of the political community. However, this study also finds that this feeling remains largely confined to citizens' relationship with the police specifically, and does not generalize into a broader distrust of the state, owing to young citizens' weak conceptual link between the two and to largely positive encounters with other street-level institutions.