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- Forssell, Anna, 1980-
(författare)
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Better safe than sorry? : Quantitative and qualitative aspects of child-father relationship after parental separation in cases involving intimate partner violence
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The relationship between a child and its parents (caregivers) is essential for the child’s development and well-being. When one of these parents uses violence against the other parent (intimate partner violence, IPV), this will affect the child one way or another: physically, psychologically, cognitively, socially. When two parents separate, the circumstances surrounding contact between the child and its parents change. The aim of this thesis is to analyse – in the context of Swedish parenting ideals and family norms – aspects of children’s relationships (after parental separation) with a father who has used violence against the mother in order to bring forward a foundation to discuss if and under what circumstances a continued contact is in the best interest of the child. The empirical basis for the thesis consists of two different sets of data. The first is qualitative interviews with children living at a women’s shelter (n=10). The second is a subset of data from a large evaluation study investigating support tochildren who had witnessed IPV. The latter material comprises interviews with and psychometric data on 165 mothers and 165 children. Results from the first article show that a majority of the children (75%) had continued contact with their fathers after parental separation, and that even in cases where there were indications of child abuse, about 50% of the children had unsupervised face-to-face contact with their fathers. This high rate can possibly be explained by the assumption (supported in legislation) that children have a need for contact. Further, the second article shows that children with and without contact do not differ in their level of well-being; i.e. contact with a violent father does not have the positive effect on children that has been found in general samples. In the third article, the violent fathers are described by the children as lazy and unreliable. Child–father contact is discussed in terms of why, when and how contact is in the child’s best interest.
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| 2. |
- Källström Cater, Åsa, 1971-
(författare)
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Negotiating normality and deviation : father's violence against mother from children's perspectives
- 2004
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- 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.
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