De-biasing or Backlash? Confronting Prejudice Among Police Officers in India

Police officers' discretionary handling of gender-based violence (GBV) complaints is a critical and largely neglected barrier to justice in developing countries. We collaborate with the Madhya Pradesh Police in India, the second largest state, to conduct a lab-in-the-field randomized experiment in which 323 male and female officers participate, and study the effect of randomly confronting officers with evidence of their biased handling of a fictitious GBV case on officer behavior and attitudes towards GBV. We find no statistically significant average effect, but sharply divergent and robust responses by officer gender. Confronted female officers prioritize the victim's statement by 23 percentage points more than controls, a 27 percent increase relative to the control mean. Male officers exhibit a backlash: they deprioritize the victim's statement, elevate the offender's statement, and on a computerized stereotyping task assign significantly more negative stereotypes to GBV victims one week after confrontation. We find no effects on deeper attitudinal outcomes such as beliefs in the truthfulness of rape complaints. A likely explanation for the heterogeneous response is the stark difference in baseline bias: 72 percent of female officers display only mild bias, while 51 percent of male officers are strongly biased. Because policing is male-dominated, the average female officer perceives a work environment more biased than her own, and women are thus willing to de-bias their case handling while men are not. Interventions targeting officer bias must account for these gender-differentiated responses to avoid unintended consequences.