Relationsvåld, kön & förändring. En studie om synen på våld i nära relationer inom socialtjänster och kvinnojour.

The aim of this study was to explore how six professionals from three organizations that handle cases of domestic violence, depict partner violence and how they describe and understand the problem of domestic violence in relation to individual and gender perspectives. To analyze this theme, I used qualitative method. Interviews was held with staff members from three different cells: a social service office, a special unit of the social service office handling domestic violence, and a women´s aid. I interviewed two from each cell and had six interviewed in total. The analysis was based on Lundbergs theory of process of normalization describing how violence in a domestic relationship commence and is uphold. Johnsons theory-model of four different types of violence in domestic relationship, was also used. Furthermore, I used the concepts: private sphere from feministic theory, construction of gender from social constructive theory, and fragmentation from social movements-theory in sociology. The result shows that the interviewed has a complex understanding of violence, were they assign both individual aspects and gender structural perspectives. The findings were also that men's cultures and patriarchal structures as well as gender roles were seen as social constructed and possible to change. The normalization model emerges as a tool to understand and manage the violence. The normalization process also seems to help the respondents make the complex understanding of the violence more understandable. Respondents' portrayal of the violence could be interpreted as consequences of fragmentation of the issue. The special unit service office, which is a gender-integrated unit and which also treating both victims and perpetrators, calls the violence violence in close relationships, while the women's aid which only helps female victim of violence calls it men's violence against women. This differences also seem to affect the perspective of how central the individual or the gender structural perspective is for the staff members, which in the long run could affect how they handle the issue of domestic violence. The conclusion is that it seems to be important to manage two levels of the issue of domestic violence, both individual and structural, to target the whole problem