Children exposed to violence as crime victims : an issue for Nordic children's rights and women's shelter organisations?

• Efforts to promote the protection of and support to abused women have opened up for new understandings of children who see, hear or in other ways are exposed to violence in their families and its consequences. However, it is also clear that although women’s shelters and children’s rights organisations increasingly have come to share the understanding of children exposed to violence as subjected to violence and crime victims, there are also differences between these organisations: they take different social positions and social inequalities as their point of departure – children and age, and women and gender respectively. Furthermore, the situation is not the same in all of the Nordic countries. The paper draws upon a pilot project mapping the range of interpretative frames and strategies used in relation to the phenomenon of children exposed to violence by a selection of children’s rights and women’s shelter organisations in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. The empirical material consists of different documents and interviews with key persons from 10 organisations working at a national level. The paper explores the differences and similarities between different organisations and different countries when it comes to interpretative frames, organisational activities and strategies in relation to policy change, particularly as regards the criminalisation of children’s exposure to violence.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Sociologi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Sociology (hsv//eng)

Publication and Content Type

pop (subject category)

kon (subject category)