Kommuners framställningar av våld i nära relationer - En kvalitativ innehållsanalys av sex kommuners

Domestic violence is a major problem in the society. How policies and other important documents are framed lays the foundation for how the social work is structured. The objective of this study is to scrutinize documents covering the course of actions in cases of domestic violence in six different municipalities. More precisely, the study aims to investigate how the proposed policies constructs and describes domestic violence from the perspective of the abused and the abuser but also its impact on practical social work. For this purpose, the study adopted a qualitative summative content analysis to examine the policies from themes occurring in previous literature. Themes identified and used are as follows: municipalities explanations and definitions for domestic violence, production of domestic violence relative to gender, especially vulnerable groups and lastly the support in the social work. After that, themes were put into the perspectives of the feminist structural theory as well as the system theoretical view, also named the family violence perspective. The findings of this study suggest that when the municipality explains violence in close relationships with the gender neutral conception domestic violence, both men and women can take the role of the abuser. However, if violence instead was formulated as men’s violence against women, results assumed the man to be the abuser and the women to be abused. From this, various understandings and explanations resulted in different courses of action and who would be subject to this support. Moreover, noticeable was that in all documents scrutinized the woman was assumed to be abused regardless of theoretical perspective