Building Trust, Handling Emotions, and Empowering Victims

The aim of this study is to explore how investigative police officers experience interviewing victims of domestic violence, focusing on the strategies they use and the professional challenges they encounter. While prior research highlights the importance of trust and relational qualities in investigative interviewing, particularly when working with vulnerable groups, there is limited knowledge about how these principles are enacted in practice. Drawing on qualitative, semi-structured interviews with eleven investigative police officers in Sweden, the study identifies four interrelated themes: building trust, emotional burdens and internal conflicts, timing, and empowering the victim. The findings show that participants rely on their ability to interpret subtle cues, adapt communication, and manage victims’ emotional states, using themselves as instruments to facilitate disclosure. At the same time, the study highlights professional challenges, including emotional strain, role conflicts between caring and supportive approaches and the investigative responsibility to remain objective, ethical dilemmas related to victims’ safety and respect for their integrity, and organizational constraints such as long waiting times. Taken together, these findings illustrate how investigative interviewing in domestic violence cases involves balancing relational sensitivity with organizational conditions and institutional demands.