Familjerättssekreterares dilemman: En kvalitativ studie om familjerättssekreterares arbete med kvinnor som utsätts för våld av män efter separation

Sammanfattning: Domestic violence is an extensive social problem that family law secretaries are familiar with. Yet there seems to be a blindness and ignorance to subsequent violence that is not established within the practice as a matter of course and is not given any decisive importance in family law secretaries' assessments. The purpose of our study is to understand how family law secretaries reason about their work with women who experience subsequent violence exercised by men in connection with custody disputes. The method chosen for this study was qualitative interviews with six different family law secretaries from six different municipalities. When analyzing the results of our empirical work we noticed a pattern in how the family law secretaries and the court differently interprets and applies the law that establishes the best interest of the child in child custody cases. We observed two conflicting logics, the legal logic, and the care logic. In our analysis we applied the social constructionist theories, institutional logic, accounts, and Judith Butler’s gender theory, to present and analyze the complexity of the subject. Our study shows that the family law secretaries find that legal logic considers the child's contact with both parents, while the caring logic values the child's protection from violence. The results of our study illustrate and problematize how the legal logic, therefore, encourages and expects the abused woman to cooperate with her perpetrator, encourage contact between the child and the abusive father, and is forced her to take responsibility for the consequences of the violence when she resists.