Editorial coordinated interventions against violence in close relationships

There is a widespread consensus in public debate in the Nordic countries that all forms of violence in close relationships constitute a fundamental violation of both women’s and children’s rights and integrity. Violence in close relationships undermines human rights in a fundamental way, as well as children’s opportunities for a safe childhood and positive life when growing up. Several policy measures have been introduced to combat violence in close relationships – in particular men’s violence against women – ranging from changes to the law and guidance for practitioners, to establishment of new organizational approaches and development of research-based methods for prevention, assessment, support and treatment. These measures can be traced back to several different political debates regarding social problems, e.g. violence against women and intimate partner violence, physical child abuse and sexual child abuse, respectively, and to different policy areas such as criminal law policy and social policy. Consequently, development has been uneven, and measures have not been instituted to create a coordinated system, but rather as responses to challenges brought to political attention by different actors and at different points in time. In addition, a high degree of specialization and internal division between units that focus on e.g. adults or families with children is a characteristic of the personal social services today (Strantz, Wiklund, and Karlsson 2016). The authority with the most far-reaching responsibility for ensuring protection of, and support to, adults and children subjected to violence in close relationships is not the coordinated whole it is often presumed to be. The result is a policy and practice terrain that is difficult to navigate for both practitioners and service users and where both adults and children subjected to violence go undetected and/or are left without protection and support. This special issue of Nordic Social Work Research highlights challenges for policy and practice in the field of violence in close relationships. It brings to the fore knowledge that is relevant both theoretically and practically for social workers and other professionals who work with support for abused adults and children.

In any work with violence in close relationships protecting victims from further violence is a paramount concern. However, problematic and contradictory demands are often placed upon persons in contact with social services, as shown by Sandra Andersson in the article Caught in the crossfire abused mothers’ struggles to navigate the Swedish domestic violence shelter system. This research draws on interviews with abused mothers and demonstrates the effects of a contradictory and gendered system in which abused mothers’ parenting skills are scrutinized and questioned. Furthermore, that demands for father-child contact coexist with demands to protect the children from their violent father. The article brings to the fore how a client position in the system entails navigating institutional practices and how service users, in this case mothers, need to develop strategies to achieve protection, here, to facilitate father-child contact without compromising the safety of their children. Andersson’s contribution underscores the time and effort – ‘labour’ – services users sometimes have to carry out to secure protection and support. This is also a key issue in another contribution drawing on women’s voices. Managing post-separation violence: mothers’ strategies and the challenges of receiving societal protection by Martina Vikander, Anna-Karin L. Larsson and Åsa Källström. The study underscores the extensive demands placed on women subjected to violence, despite the presence of relatively strong legal rights and a well-developed welfare system. It demonstrates the numerous strategies used by mothers at different phases to safeguard themselves and their children and that, on the one hand, support and protection can be achieved by the mothers’ own initiative as well as the assistance offered by society, but that mothers and children, on the other hand, sometimes remain unprotected and are forced to endure post-separation violence.

The kind of challenges voiced by service users are echoed by social workers. In Swedish social workers’ support to female survivors breaking free from male intimate partner violence, Josefin Kjellberg explores how Swedish social workers interpret and handle support needs of female survivors trying to break free from male intimate partner violence. The article illustrates how social workers may recognize structural obstacles that undermine abused women’s efforts leave abusive men while also perceiving their ability to change these obstacles as limited. Instead, social workers may direct support towards emotional obstacles. This contribution to the special issue also underscores the difficulties in offering abused women long-term, holistic support to break free from post-separation violence, and how support can be a kind of ‘lottery’ where women might not always receive the support they need. Another contribution making the same point but from a slightly different angle is Social work practices with victims of violence among people with cognitive disabilities by Filippa Klint, Åsa Källström and Lisette Farias. This study illuminates the differences in competency and resources offered to victims of violence in close relationships between mainstream victim services and disability services. While mainstream victim services have a lack of practices adapted for people with cognitive disabilities, disability services have a lack of practices for victims of violence. The negative consequences of this lack of a holistic approach in either is aggravated by the insufficient collaboration between the two.

Social work interaction can be understood as shaped by the principle of ‘social workability’ orienting towards problems that social workers can solve (Eriksson and Appel Nissen 2017). That is, as Gubrium and Järvinen (2013) argue, the everyday life issues and difficulties that create a need for assistance must be transformed into ‘problems’ that fit into established discourses and categories of solutions available within a particular institutional context. That the principle of social workability contributes to the processes of clientization within the social services (cf. Järvinen and Mik-Meyer 2003) is made clear by the research with victims of violence and social workers, respectively, discussed above. This point is also illustrated by the contribution in this issue drawing on voices from perpetrators of violence in close relationships. In Ticking the boxes: fathers’ performativity, change and intimate partner violence Rannveig Ágústa Guðjónsdóttir and Nicky Stanley show how fathers in perpetrator programmes may, on the one hand, try to perform fatherhood in line with dominant discourses of gender equal and involved fatherhood to assert their identities as good and respectable men and avoid shame, while, on the other hand, such performance may not necessarily mean that the fathers engage with or show understanding of their children’s perspectives. This paper provides insights into both possibilities of and obstacles to creating change in violent men.

There is today a substantial body of research demonstrating the detrimental effects of childhood adversity such as violence in close relationships for the health and wellbeing of children and in the later adult life as well. A key to prevent such negative effects both in the short term and long term is protection from further violence and support for recovery. In relation to children, the contributions in this special issue point to gaps in services and challenges for practice, as well as possibilities to achieve a more child-centric system and response. In Juggling conflicting demands when using a new intervention to combat child physical abuse in the Swedish child welfare services, Johanna Thulin, Åsa Landberg and Mikael Skillmark discuss possibilities to improve the practice. The case at hand is an intervention that was developed to aid leaving a child forensic interview due to suspected child physical abuse and providing professional support from child welfare services to the child and parents. The article illustrates how frontline professionals can use their discretion to navigate between different interests, for example, finding ways to adapt the intervention according to organizational demands or to push organizational boundaries to uphold what they view as the best interests of the child. In addition, Heta Kemppainen and Tanja Kamotskin discuss the space that can be afforded to children’s narratives by professionals’ interview interaction and the way they ask questions concerning children’s experiences of domestic violence. In the study The construction of a narrative space for children in an institutional interview interaction, the authors show how the phrasing of questions constructed in the interaction process set a frame for children’s narrative space. They point to key issues in developing a more child-centric and knowledge-based practice with children creating space for children’s participation and narratives about their experiences of violence. The latter is of paramount importance in terms of challenging epistemic injustice directed at children within the welfare system (cf. Iversen 2014).

Coordinated interventions require various forms of collaboration, and within the field of violence in close relationships, collaboration is central. We need to collaborate between authorities such as social services, the police and healthcare, and we need to collaborate within authorities. The division of needs assessment and the execution of interventions, combined with a market logic that characterizes welfare services, mean that social services purchase interventions from non-profit organizations, foundations, and in some contexts, private companies (Ekström and Hvenmark 2022). Social services should strive to work with evidence-based methods and ensure that the interventions they purchase and offer their clients are of good quality. With the increased responsibility to recognize violence in close relationships within social services, new needs for competence have also emerged.

Social workers in social services are now increasingly working in specialized units for intimate partner violence (Ekström 2018). As a result, there is now a group of social workers who claim to be the experts on the issue of intimate partner violence. From the concept of professional boundary work, this can be understood in terms of professionals also delimiting and guarding ”their” professional space and mandate in various ways. Sara Helmersson (2017) discusses boundary work within the field of intimate partner violence. She shows that among social services staff, there is a kind of distancing from practical support work, where counselling and treatment are highlighted as professional ideals. Eriksson et al. (2022) show similar results. However, women and children exposed to violence often also need practical support. Interventions need to be coordinated but also holistic and designed based on the specific needs of the woman and the child. When different actors – such as social services and staff at women’s shelters in their professional boundary work – make different claims to be the ones who should define what support women and children exposed to violence should receive, there is a risk that the overall picture is lost.

This special issue illustrates the current gaps in the welfare system when it comes to violence in close relationships, as well as the dire implications for the health and wellbeing of both adults and children subjected to violence. If we take the vision if social work as a person centred and holistic endeavour aimed at the empowerment of people both individually and collectively as our point of departure, clearly a lot remains to be done. Let the contributions in this special issue be the first step in further development of knowledge and improvement of policy and practice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).