The best interests of the child in access and custody disputes : A discourse analysis of the Swedish courts and their rendering of the law

The aim of this study was to analyse how Swedish courts reason about the child's best in custody and access disputes. We have assumed different themes to analyse our empirical data, these themes were the child's best interests, perspective on the child's best interests, child's perspective, children as subjects or objects and finally the right of the child or the child's best interests. Our empirical data have consisted of 15 City Court and Court of Appeal judgments of the Swedish courts handed down in 2015. The study had a qualitative disposition and the selection was made strategically to make sure the empirical data would be relevant to our issues. We have used a discourse analysis where the intention was to study how the court reason about the child’s interests and what statements that gets preference and what gets excluded in the assessment. Our theoretical starting point was extracted from Foucault’s theory about power and his discourse concept. We have used the concept of his theory in our analysis, but also extracted the theoretical concepts from previous research. The result shows that the Court's assessment of what is in the child’s best interest is based primarily on a professional and adult perspective on the child's situation. The individual child's perspective was excluded and the Court was principally talking about children's needs and interests in general. The result also showed that children were seen as objects and not as participants in the majority of the cases