NCJ Number
190137
Journal
Violence Against Women Volume: 7 Issue: 7 Dated: July 2001 Pages: 779-798
Date Published
July 2001
Length
20 pages
Annotation
This article examines the contradictory way in which policy and practice have tended to operate in both Sweden and England regarding violence against women on one hand and violence against children on the other hand.
Abstract
Since the mid-1970's, there has been increasing recognition in England of domestic violence as a crime, along with significant shifts in the approach to men's violence against women as a social problem. Similar shifts are apparent more recently in Sweden. There has been a trend away from emphasizing a woman's own responsibility to solve the problem or protect herself toward a view of violence against women in intimate relationships as an unacceptable crime that all agencies should aim to prevent. Little attention, however, has been given to the impact of spousal abuse on a parent's ability to protect and care for children. Children are at risk of direct abuse by the perpetrators of spousal violence, or children may suffer psychological harm from an awareness of their mother being abused. In both England and Sweden, it has been expected that parents will solve any conflicts that affect the children. Because of this separation of spousal abuse from child-parent interactions, the possibility exists that abusive men will use the threat of obtaining child custody in the event of divorce as a means of keeping abused women in the marriage. Nordberg (1997) argued that fatherhood had replaced marriage as the social institution that maintained men's control of women. Further, when divorces do occur in cases of violent marriages, the courts have tended to adopt the position that regardless of the previous pattern of behavior, most fathers are deemed able to offer some benefit to their children. In such cases, courts have displaced men's responsibilities for their violence by portraying women's fears as unreasonable or even harmful to their children. Although virtually any involvement by fathers with their children increasingly has come to be considered "good-enough" fathering, motherhood has been under continual scrutiny, with the role of the "good-enough" mother probably impossible to fulfill and easily open to criticism and blame. There is evidence, however, that the courts and some professionals in both England and Sweden are beginning to question, if not move away from, legal approaches that promote children's interactions with a violent father. 14 notes and 62 references