Avaa tiedosto - TamPub - Tampereen yliopisto

21 of these, occurred violence, allegedly occurred violence or threats of violence affected
the decision, and 26 in turn bring forth that occurred violence, allegedly occurred
violence or threats of violence did not have an impact on the judge’s decision.
Among the grounds for decisions I distinguished different kinds of ways of explaining
how the impact of violence assessed as having occurred on judges’ decisions is admitted
or denied. When occurred violence is said to have had an impact on the decision,
the most used explanation clearly was that its occurrence reveals the quarrelsome relationship
between parents and thus prevents joint custody. The fear that mothers have for
fathers is used as grounds for both awarding sole custody to mothers and supervised visits
between children and their fathers. The impact of violence on decisions over visits is
justified in other ways as well. Unsupervised visits can be expressed to pose a risk to
children, and children’s fear can be described as well as anger towards the parent having
behaved violently. When violence is not a decisive factor, the most used explanations
are that violence has not been used against children and that it is in past. In the written
grounds, violence is also defined as an issue related to parents’ intimate relationship,
which is not connected to the assessment of parenthood. In addition, the texts include
mentions of how mild the occurred violence was and how riskless the threats were.
When violence is said to have an effect on the final decisions, the perpetrator in
most cases is the father of the family. This is hardly surprising because the cases show
that most particularly fathers are alleged of being violent and more solid evidence has
been presented of it. Among the texts are also written grounds which imply that also
mothers’ violent behaviour has affected the decision of the court. When the significance
of violence is denied, the ways in which this is explained are common to how violent
behaviour displayed by both mothers and fathers is dealt with. This reveals that dealing
with violence is not always organized clearly according to the gender of the perpetrator.
Of the written grounds for the decisions, I identified three different violence discourses.
By the interaction discourse I refer to how violence in the family is interpreted
to be about unsuccessful interaction and about a difficult intimate relationship. The interaction
discourse has an indisputably visible position in the data. It is used to weigh
the validity of the allegation of violence and the significance of used violence. Through
it the impact of violence on the decision can be both admitted and denied. In addition to
intimate partner violence, the interaction discourse concerns also violence against children.
Violence can, for example, be interpreted to mean difficulties in getting along with
children. Suspicion of violence against children can also be denied on the grounds that
the parent-child interaction has been observed and found to be good.
265