Negotiating normality and deviation : father's violence against mother from children's perspectives

The aim of this study is to contribute to understanding of how children try to understand and interpret their own father and his (possibly) violent actions against their mother in relation to their general conceptualizations concerning fathers and violence. A general social psychological and interactionist approach is related to the children’s selves as the organizing and experiencing structures, the family as the arena for experiences and communicative interaction, and society as a structure of norms and general ideas. The study is based on interviews with ten children, who were eight to twelve years old at the time of the interview and whose mothers had escaped from their fathers’ violence to a Women’s House. Qualitative interpretation of each child’s complex abstracted and generalized conceptualizations of fathers and violence enabled the understanding of individual themes as crucial parts of each child’s logically unified and conciliated symbolic meaning through the theoretical construct of negotiation. The study results in the identification of three alternative theoretical approaches to meaning-conciliation. One can be described as ‘conceptual fission’ in the general conception of fathers, one as ‘conceptual fission’ in the conception of the own father and one as negotiating the extension of the opposite of violence, described as ‘goodness’. These negotiations can be understood as parts of distancing violence from either one subgroup of fathers, from the overall, essential or principle understanding of the own father within the child’s relationship with him, or from fathers altogether, including the child’s own. The children’s attempts to combine normalization of their father as an individual with resistance to his violent acts are interpreted as indicating the difficulty that the combination of the social deviancy of violence and the family context constitutes for many children

Negotiating normality and deviation : father's violence against mother from children's perspectives

The aim of this study is to contribute to understanding of how children try to understand and interpret their own father and his (possibly) violent actions against their mother in relation to their general conceptualizations concerning fathers and violence. A general social psychological and interactionist approach is related to the children’s selves as the organizing and experiencing structures, the family as the arena for experiences and communicative interaction, and society as a structure of norms and general ideas. The study is based on interviews with ten children, who were eight to twelve years old at the time of the interview and whose mothers had escaped from their fathers’ violence to a Women’s House. Qualitative interpretation of each child’s complex abstracted and generalized conceptualizations of fathers and violence enabled the understanding of individual themes as crucial parts of each child’s logically unified and conciliated symbolic meaning through the theoretical construct of negotiation. The study results in the identification of three alternative theoretical approaches to meaning-conciliation. One can be described as ‘conceptual fission’ in the general conception of fathers, one as ‘conceptual fission’ in the conception of the own father and one as negotiating the extension of the opposite of violence, described as ‘goodness’. These negotiations can be understood as parts of distancing violence from either one subgroup of fathers, from the overall, essential or principle understanding of the own father within the child’s relationship with him, or from fathers altogether, including the child’s own. The children’s attempts to combine normalization of their father as an individual with resistance to his violent acts are interpreted as indicating the difficulty that the combination of the social deviancy of violence and the family context constitutes for many children

Trappan-modellen för samtal med barn som upplevt våld i familjen : en utvärdering för metodutveckling

Föreliggande rapport har tillkommit inom enheten för FoU-stöd vid Regionförbundet i Uppsala län. Initiativet till utvärderingen togs av personal som arbetar med barn i våldsutsatta familjer vid Trappan, en Råd och stödverksamhet i Uppsala kommun. Barn som lever i familjer där våld ingår i vardagen far mycket illa. Vart tionde barn har någon gång sett eller hört en förälder – oftast mamma – bli slagen. På initiativ från Rädda Barnen utvecklades under slutet av 1990-talet en modell för krissamtal med barn i våldsutsatta miljöer. Modellen kallas Trappan och den presenteras bl a i Inger Ekboms och Ami Arnells bok ”och han sparkade mamma…”. Trappan-modellen har sedan dess spridits över landet, men någon utvärdering som inkluderar barnen och som fokuserar på effekter har inte tidigare gjorts. Trappan-modellen används i Uppsala kommun sedan 2000. Personalens erfarenheter är att insatsen verkar ge ett betydelsefullt stöd till barnen, men man hade ett behov av att få mer tillförlitlig kunskap om Trappan-modellens effektivitet. Studien har genomförts av fil dr Åsa Källström Cater, från Örebro Universitet, med ekonomiskt stöd via projektmedel från Länsstyrelsen. Eftersom studien gjorts med begränsade resurser har det inte funnits möjligheter att göra ett upplägg med kontrollgrupp, men Regionförbundets FoU-verksamhet var angelägna om att anlita en forskare för att få ett vetenskapligt hållbart upplägg på utvärderingen. En referensgrupp med representanter från Trappan, från IFO-ledningen i Uppsala kommun, professor Elisabet Näsman vid Sociologiska institutionen, Uppsala universitet samt FoU-stöd har följt projektet. Resultatet av utvärderingen visar att Trappan-samtalen kan förbättra barnens allmänna psykiska hälsa och livssituation

Children’s talk about fathers’ regret : making sense of fathers’ violence against mothers

Purpose: The aim of this study is to investigate children’s sense-making about their fathers’ attitudes about using violence against the child’s mother. More specifically, we examine various ways in which the children reflect on whether, and if so how, their father showed regret. Method: This study used data from interviews with 31 children (14 boys and 17 girls) aged between 10 and 14 years, using a semi-structured interview guide. The children’s narratives were analyzed using discourse analysis. Results: We found that most of the children in this study positioned their fathers as regretful in relation to two discourses - on violence and on fatherhood - that are prominent in the interviews. Some children, however, positioned their fathers as inconsistent or non-regretful, saying they did not express regret emotionally, did not change their behavior, did not communicate regret, or communicated it in a self-contradictory way. In their narratives the children sometimes used interpretative repertoires - about feelings, actions, and communication - to explain why they thought their father did or did not regret his use of violence. Conclusion: Positioning one’s father as regretful after having committed IPV can be a way to make the father’s attitudes about the violence understandable, both to the children and to others. Discourses on violence and fatherhood can, however, constrain children’s narratives about their fathers’ violence, which is important to keep in mind when working with children who have been exposed to IPV and making decisions that concern them

Hur SOS Barnbyars mentorprogram motsvarar unga migranters behov och förväntningar

Editors: Björn Johansson och Daniel UhnooKänslor av tillhörighet bland EBO-placerade ungdomar i ett transnationellt sammanhan

Hur SOS Barnbyars mentorprogram motsvarar unga migranters behov och förväntningar

Editors: Björn Johansson och Daniel UhnooKänslor av tillhörighet bland EBO-placerade ungdomar i ett transnationellt sammanhan