%0 Report
        %A Amaral, Sofia
%A Chaney, Kim
%A Kaiser, Victoria
%A Prakash, Nishith
%A Sahay, Abhilasha
        %T De-biasing or Backlash? Confronting Prejudice Among Police Officers in India
        %D 2026
        %8 2026 May
        %I Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        %C Bonn
        %7 IZA Discussion Paper
        %N 18699
        %U https://www.iza.org/publications/dp18699
        %X Police officers' discretionary handling of gender-based violence (GBV) complaints is a critical barrier to justice in developing countries. We collaborate with the Madhya Pradesh Police in India to conduct a lab-in-the-field experiment with 323 officers, studying the effect of confronting officers with evidence of their biased handling of a fictitious GBV case. We find no average effect, but sharply divergent 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, and assign more negative stereotypes to GBV victims one week after confrontation. A likely explanation 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, women are more willing to de-bias their case handling while men are not. Interventions targeting officer bias must account for gender-differentiated responses to avoid unintended consequences.
        %K prejudice confrontation
%K gender heterogeneity
%K gender-based violence
%K police bias
%K backlash
%K stereotype reduction
%K lab-in-the-field experiment
%K India