Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

2-2026

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

Psychology

Advisor

Brett Stoudt

Committee Members

Michelle Fine

Celina Su

Caitlin Cahill

Jenn Rolnick Borchetta

Subject Categories

Community-Based Research | Community Psychology | Criminology | Gender and Sexuality | Politics and Social Change | Race and Ethnicity | Social Justice | Social Psychology

Keywords

participatory action research, state violence, policing, sexual violence, healing, abolition

Abstract

In the era following both Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, police sexual violence (PSV) currently constitutes the second most commonly reported police complaint after excessive force. Police across the U.S. are caught for some form of sexual misconduct once every five days, with on-duty officers found to commit sexual assaults at more than double the rate of the general population. The gendered and racialized perpetration of sexual violence extends far beyond policing; however, it has been intensified within the masculine, militarized carceral structures designed to legally control and punish.

Accordingly, this dissertation utilizes an interdisciplinary, multi-method approach to offer what is, to my knowledge, the first in-depth study of the lived experience of sexual violence enacted by officers outside of prisons and jails, in the city with the nation’s largest police force. The project draws from 37 interviews and a survey of over 3,700 New Yorkers to examine the ways in which survivors experience, resist, and heal from these incidents. Conducted in partnership with a citywide coalition of over 200 community organizations, this study captures: (i) the lived experiences, contextual complexities, and cumulative consequences of the wide range of acts that constitute PSV—including everyday forms of sexual harassment, legal forms of frisking and strip searches, and criminal forms of sexual coercion and assault—as well as their accumulation in the lives of those navigating heavily policed environments; (ii) pervasive psychosocial processes of dehumanization, misogyny, and hegemonic masculine bonding that not only underlie a diverse spectrum of sexual violence within an institutional culture and legal landscape of impunity, but also reflect gendered and racialized hierarchies of humanity that shape differential vulnerabilities to both interpersonal and state harm; (iii) participants’ modes of creating safety through relational embodiment to illuminate healing as a fundamentally collective decolonial project, requiring an interplay of individualized psychological and somatic growth, along with social and systemic transformation; and (iv) a collective reimagining of justice oriented toward immediate repair, harm reduction, long-term prevention, and the development of healing-centered communities.

Ultimately, this dissertation reframes PSV as an ongoing force of terror(ism) and form of state betrayal that strengthens the widespread internalization of dehumanizing carceral logics, eroding our collective safety. Participants’ experiential knowledge sheds light on structural, ideological, psychosocial, and embodied ways to address the root causes of various forms of racialized and gendered harms. In doing so, this work seeks to inform existing abolitionist and intersectional feminist research, as well as social movements against both sexual violence and police harm.

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