Avaa tiedosto - TamPub - Tampereen yliopisto

and the non-residential parent did not, judges mostly arrived at supervised visitations. In
enforcement cases, the decisions mostly followed earlier decisions or agreements.
My data includes altogether 51 cases with allegations of physical violence that have
been settled or withdrawn or in which one of the parents has given up in the middle of
the legal process. In light of this research, criticism targeted at settling in particular
seems well grounded: there are cases in the data in which settling takes place according
to the will of the father proven guilty of serious violent offence and the content of the
agreement with joint custody and unsupervised visits jeopardizes the safety of victims
of violence.
Violence in the grounds for decisions made in court
Chapter 7 analyses the written grounds for judges’ decisions in court. The data here included
the grounds for 139 decisions (including earlier district court decisions in the
cases in the courts of appeal). I examined how often judges take a stand on violence,
how they assess the truthfulness of allegations of violence and whether violence assessed
as true affects their decisions. Among the stands taken on violence, I identified
different discourses on violence as well.
In the grounds for their decisions, judges look at parenthood and children’s lives
from several perspectives, and violence rarely lies in the focus of assessment. It is
common for written grounds not to take any stand on violence or, if they do, they do it
often indirectly indeed, which is the case in half of them. Even when a stand on violence
is taken, it can be taken very vaguely and even by rubbing the edge off the words.
As judges assess the truthfulness of allegations of violence, the accuracy of describing
the assessment process varies as well as the clarity of expressed conclusion. Here
the written information produced by the authorities or other professionals on violence is
of great significance. It is only rarely that allegations of violence can be defined to be
true without this kind of evidence.
The significance of violence for judges’ decisions is not always directly expressed in
the grounds for decisions. Sometimes assessing whether the alleged acts of violence are
true and weighing the significance of violence are intertwined. After reading the stands
taken on violence from the viewpoint of the impact of violence I arrived at the conclusion
that in altogether 47 grounds for decisions, judges’ views on the significance of
violence for the decision over the child custody dispute in question could be detected. In
264