Professor Margareta Hydén
Institutionen för samhälls- och välfärdsstudier
Linköpings universitet, Campus Norrköping

2010-2015

The project is based on interviews with children and young people witnessing violence at home, with important persons in their social network and social workers engaged in the families. Domestic violence takes place in specific social contexts, formed by the social relationships such as families, relatives, friends and neighbours, that constitute the social networks of those involved. The network members respond to the violence, and the responses can be of vital importance for ending the violence, or may even contribute to its perpetuation. Based on social network analysis and narrative analysis, the project examines the role of the social networks in upholding or ceasing the violence and supporting the children.

Major results
Claims that domestic violence is best deemed a 'hidden crime' tend to equate being hidden with non-disclosure to social services, the police or other criminal justice professionals. However, the social worlds of domestic violence victims are much more intricate than this. Family, relatives, friends and neighbours usually form the immediate social world of domestic violence. The term 'response network' was introduced in the project for grasping the interaction between the actors. A response network can be defined as 'a sociocultural structure of relationships between actors, bound by efforts to control the violence'. Some of the response network in the project encompassed over 50 persons.

When the network members perform these actions with some degree of cooperation, their actions connect to other responding parts of the network. In such instances they can also become redefined by actions in response to the violence. Most important for the children were interactions that formed a "stop-subsystem" often with the men in the network as major actors. The police could be contacted if the stop-subsystem failed, but it was never the first choice. Most response networks in the study had developed sub-systems for supporting the children. Social services were only contacted through the police.

There has been a shift in the use of terms in the positioning of the children. The frequently used "witness" has been replaced by "exposure" to violence. The Swedish Health and Medical Services Act has recently granted the children the status of "relatives", justifying their rights to information, advice and support. They have been official recognized as "crime victims", meaning they are entitled to financial compensation. This shift in taxonomy has insured the children entitlement to institutionalized support from the adult world, which is important. However, this does not give the "multi-responding" children in the study full justice. The children were frequently positioned at the centre of the response network, both at recipients of care and as partners in the stop subsystem. This was especially the case for some the teen-aged boys. The health consequences for the children were not exclusively related to the violent incident, but to their position in the response network as well.

The grandparents upheld a special position in the network. Their responses included giving practical, financial, material and emotional support. They talked to and comforted the grandchildren, as well as encouraged and persuaded the grandchildren's mother to leave the abusive relationship. Moreover, several of the grandparents seemed to play a central role as "a spider in the web", maintaining contact with others in the children's social networks. Grandparents can be a resource for domestic violence services, and social work practice needs to assess the roles of grandparents of children exposed to domestic violence. Social workers should consider the challenges these grandparents are facing and what support they may need in order to support their grandchildren.

One sub-study concerned teachers and other adults at the school. The results showed that they were very well aware of their vulnerable children and had a vast repertoire of ways to support the children - some official, some non-official. Social workers should consider the challenges these teachers and find ways of collaborating in the best interest of the children.

New research questions generated by the project
The most important research questions to further investigate are questions like: Is a central position in the network the most favourable for taking action in stopping the violence or supporting the victims, or could a more distant position give more space and possibilities? In order to explore these and similar questions, research collaboration with The Stockholm City Mission has started.

What social network responses are most favourable for the children? How are the response networks structured, what kind of processes are developed, that are most favourable for the children? These questions are crucial for the further development of a response based approach from the children's perspective.

There is a need for further development of a mixed-method approach, combining social network analysis and narrative analysis. Margareta Hydén and David Gadd, The University of Manchester have initiated such a project, in collaboration with Thomas Grund, University College Dublin.

International collaboration
In 2010, Margareta Hydén took the initiative to form the Responses to Interpersonal Violence International Network (RIV), a multidisciplinary collaborative project where about twenty members across Scandinavia, Canada, Australia, the UK, and South Africa meet and study responses to interpersonal violence in different social and cultural contexts. The project is part of the RIV program.

In 2015 Margareta Hydén was appointed Visiting Professor at the Centre for Criminology and Criminal Justice, The University of Manchester.

Other forms of dissemination of the results of the project
The results have been presented at seminars, lectures and conferences

The two most important publications stemming from the project

Hydén M.; Gadd, D. & Wade, A. (2016). Response Based Approaches to the Study of Interpersonal Violence. London: Palgrave Macmillan. T

Interpersonal violence has been the focus of research within the social sciences for some considerable time. Yet inquiries about the causes of interpersonal violence and the effects on the victims have dominated the field of research and clinical practice. Central to the contributions in this volume is the idea that interpersonal violence is a social action embedded in responses from various actors. These include actions, words and behaviour from friends and family, ordinary citizens, social workers and criminal justice professionals. These responses, as the contributors to this volume all show, make a difference in terms of how violence is understood, resisted and come to terms with in its immediate aftermath and over the longer term.

Bringing together an international network of scholars and practitioners from a range of disciplines and fields of practice, this book maps and expands research on interpersonal violence. In doing so, it opens an important new terrain on which social responses to violence can be fully interrogated in terms of their intentions, meanings and outcomes and what counts as a "responsible" and a "responsive" response.

Hydén, M. & Johansson, M. (2014) Skolans möjligheter att stödja barn med svåra uppväxtvillkor på landsbygd?En studie i professionalitet och medmänsklighet. Stockholm: Allmänna Barnhuset. (Teachers' possibilities to support vulnerable children in rural areas. A study of professionalism and humanity).

In this study (in Swedish) the teachers told about various ways they supported the children - officially and non-officially.

Publications

Hydén, M. (2016) ”The Response Network”. I: M. Hydén, D. Gadd & A. Wade (2016) Response Based Approaches to the Study of Interpersonal Violence. London: Palgrave Macmillan. pp 77-97

Sandberg, L. (2016). ”Caught in-between: Grandparents Responding to Violence and Negotiating Family Roles and Responsibilities” I: M. Hydén, D. Gadd & A. Wade (2016) Response Based Approaches to the Study of Interpersonal Violence. London: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 98-114

Hydén, M. & Johansson, M. (2014) Skolans möjligheter att stödja barn med svåra uppväxtvillkor på landsbygd
En studie i professionalitet och medmänsklighet. Stockholm: Allmänna Barnhuset. http://www.allmannabarnhuset.se/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Skolans-möjlighet.pdf

Sandberg, L. (2013). “Being There for my Grandchild: Grandparents’ Responses to Their Grandchildrens Exposure to Domestic Violence. Child and Family Social Work, Doi: 10.1111/cfs.12123.

Sandberg, L. (2013). ”Backward, dumb and violent hillbillies? Rural Geographies and Intersectional Studies on Intimate Partner Violence” Affilia Journal of Women and Social Work, 28: 350-365.
Awarded 2014 Affilia Award for Distinguished Feminist Scholarship and Praxis in Social Work.