Station Stereotypes... DVU:

Sandra works in the Domestic Violence Unit (DVU) at Blandmore Police Station. In recent years Domestic Violence has received widespread media attention, so naturally this hallowed department is the epitome of efficiency and professionalism. It is manned by highly-trained, motivated career officers who put victim care at the heart of their day-to-day work and have gone through a rigorous selection process to get there. You would think.

Sandra's main responsibility is to read the risk assessments filled in by response officers (myself) at the scene of domestic incidents, and to decide whether or not she assesses the risk to be the same level of risk that the response officer has assessed it to be. She then phones the victim and fills in a secondary risk assessment with several more questions that the response officer was not trained how to ask. Sometimes Sandra dispatches Social Services or locksmiths to the aid of her victims, and on increasingly regular occasions she identifies that the attending officer (myself) has not arrested someone that Sandra feels should have been arrested. She can then take immediate remedial action in the form of a rude email asking the officer to arrest the person. Sandra is not allowed to visit victims personally nor arrest anybody because, as is one of the prerequisites for joining DVU, Sandra is PREGNANT, and therefore a HEALTH AND SAFETY RISK.

In fact, there is only one member of DVU who is not pregnant at Blandmore, and he is the sergeant.

You are probably thinking that it is a pretty poor criterion for such an important job, merely to be pregnant. You do Blandshire Constabulary an injustice, as it does not discriminate simply on this basis: the applicants also have to be female, in their first three years of service and unqualified for any other job. Under such circumstances, few departments could be expected to house these sad wretches, struck down by the blight of pregnancy before they can map out a promising career path. Enter DVU.

Sandra will be there for a few months before she has the baby, whereupon another unfortunate will no doubt be shoved into her place. Fortunately, as all these poor cretins are female, they are anyway ultimately destined for a life of sitting at a desk, making phonecalls and thinking about darling babies, so the sooner they get the idea of career prospects out of their pretty little heads the better.

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