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This study elucidates the responses of shelters and their adaptations to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the effects on their services to victims of violence, as well as how shelter managers assess the situation for victims, including changes in the rates and character of the violence observed by the shelters. A web-based survey was distributed twice to all Norwegian shelters (N = 46): first during the lockdown in spring 2020 and second during the relaxation of infection control measures in summer 2020. The shelters in Norway remained open during the COVID-19 pandemic. The majority saw a reduction in the number of requests during the lockdown, while the rates returned to normal when the strictest infection control measures were lifted. They expressed concern about the decline in requests during the lockdown as well as the well-being of some groups, such as victims from ethnic minority backgrounds, children, and victims with additional challenges. A majority of the shelters did not report changes in the content of the requests. Nevertheless, a third of them had observed instances of the virus and/or infection control measures being used by perpetrators as part of the violence and coercive control strategies. The shelters in Norway, as an integrated part of the welfare state, in general seem to have met the needs of their clients during the pandemic. Yet, the study revealed important inequalities and deficiencies in access to services for some groups, and in the general support and recognition by authorities of the shelters.

Researchers are increasingly interested in why people want to participate in qualitative interview studies, particularly what they hope to gain from participating. The present paper contributes to this research agenda by analysing the motivations of victims of interpersonal violence: a group that is considered ethically challenging to involve in research, given their history of being intruded upon. The analysis is based on 174 qualitative interviews from three separate studies: two on intimate partner violence and one on sexual assault. A key finding is that many victims welcome the opportunity to participate and often use the interviews for their own purposes. We identified three different ‘participant orientations’, or ways victims relate to the interview and the research, including ‘telling for oneself’, ‘telling for others’ and ‘telling for the researcher’. We discuss how these orientations imply different ethical contracts between the participant and researcher and their links to recruitment methods.

It is increasingly acknowledged that companion animal abuse often occurs in the same contexts as other types of abuse, particularly domestic abuse. However, the co-occurrence and strengths of these associations in the general population have not been well established in research. With data from a large representative sample of Norwegian adolescents, we aimed to determine 1) the extent to which Norwegian children are exposed to companion animal abuse in the family, 2) whether and how companion animal abuse is linked to other forms of domestic abuse that children experience, and 3) background factors associated with companion animal abuse. A total of 9240 adolescents aged 12–16 years ( Mage 14.7) participated in the digital school-based survey. Four percent ( n = 380) reported that they had ever witnessed a parent being violent towards a family companion animal, whereas 1% ( n = 125) had experienced that an adult in the household had threatened to harm a companion animal. There was a substantial overlap between companion animal abuse and child abuse, and it most frequently co-occurred with psychological abuse and less severe forms of physical child abuse. This resonates with conceptualizations of domestic abuse as an ongoing pattern of psychological abuse and coercive control. The risk factors identified for companion animal abuse in this representative sample of adolescents were similar to known risk factors for domestic abuse. Low socioeconomic status and parents’ substance abuse, parents’ psychiatric illness, and parents’ history of incarceration entailed a greater risk of experiencing companion animal abuse. We conclude that companion animal abuse co-occurs with other forms of domestic abuse and that it may be considered a part of the repertoire of domestic abuse that impacts children.

This article explores the extent to which the human rights framework relating to sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) is upheld in the Norwegian asylum system, by investigating if and how asylum bureaucrats enable the disclosure of SGBV and how such disclosure may impact the assessment of applicants’ credibility. Credibility assessment is important in deciding who is eligible for protection. Eliciting disclosures of SGBV in general is notoriously difficult, and SGBV allegations are often disbelieved. It is also well known that credibility assessment in the asylum system involves working with ambiguity and challenges, but this has rarely been explored with a particular focus on SGBV. Through an analysis of public case summaries and 18 semi-structured interviews with asylum caseworkers and key actors, drawing on Lipsky’s theory of street-level bureaucrats, we conclude that caseworkers’ use of coping mechanisms makes them reluctant to enable, or engage with, disclosures of SGBV, and that this may endanger human rights. publishedVersion

This chapter places Nancy Fraser's care crisis concept in the Nordic welfare society context. Fraser has developed her discussion of the care crisis with a focus mainly on the Anglo-American model, that is, in societies very different from the Nordic welfare model regarding the organisation of reproductive work, gender equality policies, and labour market regulation. In her broad framework, ‘crisis of care’ is ‘best interpreted as a more or less acute expression of the social-reproductive contradictions of financialised capitalism’. The chapter argues that her understanding of the role of reproductive work in capitalist societies today, as well as the idea of a deepening care crisis, also makes sense in a discussion of Nordic societies. There is, however, a need to take into account the historically specific institutional configurations, policies, and social practices that render the dynamics of care crisis in the Nordic welfare states different and variegated, but nonetheless fundamentally engender crisis tendencies that are becoming more and more visible.

This chapter gives a broad overview of the field by bringing in to focus the value of contemporary, critical masculinity studies to feminist work on intimate partner violence. It begins by providing an outline of feminist engagements with intimate partner violence, from its origins to more contemporary work that interrogate questions of difference and diversity. We introduce masculinity studies and its relative lack of serious work on violence, specifically in a global Northern context, and we make a case that theorising about men, masculinity and intimate partner violence is fundamental and it must keep the intersectional entanglements of identities and social inequalities in mind in order to avoid the risk of reproducing classed and racial hierarchies. This chapter ends with an outline of the various chapters to the volume and its contributions to the study of men, masculinities and intimate partner violence.

Male victims of intimate partner violence hold an ambiguous position in feminist research and in theory, including in critical studies of men and masculinities. This is due to the ways in which male victims of violence are framed in intertwined academic and political struggles over gendered patterns of victimisation. Recently, there has been a rise of antifeminist mobilisation spanning from organisations and lobby groups to looser groupings on social media. This is an important context which further complicates the contemporary politicisation of male victims. This chapter sheds light on the interface between masculinist policies and men’s personal stories of victimisation by analysing how the narrative framing and affective space offered by a masculinist/antifeminist men’s rights organisation works for individual male violence victims. By highlighting the ambiguities between the organisation’s mobilisation of collective emotions bolstering an antifeminist narrative of men as a discriminated group, and individual male victim’s personal stories and feelings, the chapter elucidates the complex relations between the personal and the political in contemporary masculinist policies.

This article offers a qualitative, institutional analysis of the dynamics of revictimization as the accumulation of disadvantages over time and across different institutional contexts, and ...

This article contributes to the methodological debate on how to define and measure violence in order to more effectively capture gendered patterns of exposure to violence in survey studies. The authors take as their starting point Walby and Towers’ proposals to mainstream gender in surveys, and to define violence more narrowly by adding the concept of injury. This article applies Walby and Towers’ quality criteria to a Norwegian survey on violence and rape, and finds that it performs relatively well in accounting for the main gender dimensions they propose. The article presents an analysis of the gender dimensions of violence in the original study, as well as a re-analysis of the data, including harm in line with Walby and Towers’ propositions. It also adds fear of being severely injured or killed. Based on this analysis, the authors conclude that acts alone represent an adequate measure for severe violence and sexual violence and the gendered pattern of exposure. In contrast with Walby and Towers’ assumption, adding harm did not change the gender distribution of exposure. However, adding fear of being injured or killed made a gender difference.

This chapter presents findings from a study that explored intimate partner violence (IPV) and its relation to gender, gender equality and power, drawing on qualitative interviews with 28 women and 9 men. The chapter argues that being exposed to violence from an intimate partner in a presumed gender equal country represents a particular minority position, and for whom the Norwegian gender equal legislation and discourse may become part of the problem: Love and gender equality could be used as rhetorical resources for the perpetrator, and gendered patterns of care may contribute to the gendered character of IPV. Furthermore, the language of love and the ideals of trust and transparency in a relationship could be used and abused by the perpetrator to legitimize coercive control. Gender equality and the ideal of gender balance could also be used as rhetorical resources by the abuser, including the sharing of housework, political engagement against violence as well as shared parenting after divorce. This shows that egalitarian attitudes and gender balance in the division of labour in the home are not incompatible with the exercise of violence. Further, gendered expectations and feelings of care and love formed a gendered entanglement that made it difficult to leave. Fear of the perpetrator and concern for children’s safety in the context of the contemporary egalitarian post-separation regime in Norway further added to victims’ ordeals.

This article explores how families with young children arrive at and live with different work–family adaptations within a welfare state that strongly supports the dual earner/dual carer model—that of Norway. It draws on a qualitative study among Norwegian-born and Polish-born parents, representing respectively ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ views on this model. The analysis aims at capturing the dynamic interplay between structures and policies, and everyday practices. We found that both Norwegian and Polish parents embraced the cultural ideal of the dual earner/dual carer model, but that their perceived scope of action differed. Within the Norwegian group there were differences related to class, however. Among middle-class Norwegian parents, the model was internalised as a moral obligation and part of identity, making it difficult to voice and cope with work–family conflict. Working-class parents in this group, varied more in their identification with this model. Across class, Polish parents, in contrast, used welfare state entitlements eclectically to shape new and more gender equal family practices in Norway, and to adjust to changing circumstances. The article illustrates how enabling structures may represent both opportunities for and limitation to individual agency, undermining the assumption of a simple ‘fit’ between work–family policies, work–family adaptations and gender equality in the family. This article was funded by the Polish–Norwegian Research Programme under the Norway Grants funding scheme. Grant number EOG78.

Bjornholt offers a reflection on 25 years of feminist economics, providing illustrative examples of how feminist academic critique, within and outside of academia, in combination with civil engagement, has evolved, promoting change towards better economics, better policies and well-being for all. Mirroring the widening scope over time of feminist economics, Bjornholt discusses the exclusion of care and other life-sustaining, unpaid work from systems of national accounts and efforts to make them count; efforts to achieve gender justice through gender-responsive budgeting; the effort to bring society’s attention to the extent of domestic violence and its consequences; and understanding economics as social provisioning, which considers the responsibility to care for everything, including human rights and our shared living space Earth, when assessing the consequences of macroeconomic policy.

The aim of this paper is to develop a conceptual framework for addressing intergenerational transmission, historical change and agency. The framework will be employed to analyse the findings from a longitudinal follow-up study over two generations of men, where couples from Norway participated in an experimental research study, the Work-Sharing Couples Project, which aimed to promote egalitarian work-family adaptations in the early 1970s. The original study was based on both spouses working part-time and shift parenting. The follow-up study concluded that the untraditional work-family arrangement had not been passed on to the sons. The article develops a multidimensional analysis of the work-family adaptations of men in two generations: the untraditional adaptation of fathers in the 1970s; and the neo-traditional adaptations of sons in the 2000s.In developing a four-dimensional approach to intergenerational transmission and social change, the article contributes to the study of intergenerational transmission through the comparison of situated agency in different generations and time/ spaces. Taking into account different aspects of time and space, personal biography, discursive and material structures of opportunity, and intergenerational dynamics at the family level as well as at social level, the article contributes to theorizing longitudinal qualitative research by linking the micro-level to the macro-level.

This article addresses a methodological controversy regarding the question of whether couples should ideally be interviewed together or apart. It draws on three different studies in which joint couple interviews were used either as the sole source of data or in combination with individual interviews. The authors focus on the specifics and strengths of joint couple interviews, and they argue that interviewing couples together has several advantages, such as solving the ethical problems of anonymity and consent among interviewees, and results in the production of rich data, including observational data. Furthermore, the authors point to the practical advantages of conducting joint interviews with couples. In taking a relational view of the self and of what is produced in research interviews, the authors propose to apply the concept of family display, originally proposed by Janet Finch. It is argued that the researcher may be seen as one of many possible audiences for this type of family practice.

The Work-Sharing Couples Study was an action research project conducted in the early 1970s to reconcile work, family and gender equality in families. Its design involved both spouses working part-t ...

PurposeThis article outlines the longitudinal consequences for men who participated in the work‐sharing couples study which was a Norwegian, experimental research project in the early 1970s. The aim of the original project was to promote gender equality and a better work/life balance in families; the design involved both spouses working part‐time and sharing childcare and housework. This paper aims to present the results of a longitudinal follow‐up study of the participants in the work‐sharing couples study. In this paper the work‐sharing men's part‐time adaptations and the impact of the work‐sharing arrangement on their careers is the main focus.Design/methodology/approachThe original project had a small scale, interventionist design based on couples working part‐time and sharing childcare and housework; effects were documented by questionnaires and time diaries. In the follow‐up study 30 years later, retrospective life‐course couple interviews with the original participants were used. The current paper is based on an analysis of the couple interviews with a particular focus on the men's careers.FindingsObtaining part‐time work was not difficult, and working part‐time was mostly uncomplicated for the men. Neither did their working part time for a substantial amount of time have negative career effects, and they were rather successful professionally. Their experiences as work sharers were mainly positively valued at their workplaces as adding to managerial skills. For those who did not have a managerial career, this was due to personal choice rather than any negative effect of working part‐time.Practical implicationsChanging men's adaptations to work and care is high on the agenda in family research as well as in policy making and the findings from this study contributes to new knowledge which is of interest in research as well as policy making.Originality/valueThe original project was unique internationally, and so is the longitudinal follow‐up of this experiment. The work‐sharing men's part‐time adaptations and the longitudinal impact on their careers provide new and contra‐intuitive insights into the question of men, work and family.

Like father, like sons? : the transmission of values, family practices and work-family adaptations to sons of work-sharing men

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to outline the background as well as methodological and epistemological aspects to, and the effects of, a follow‐up study 30 years later of the work‐sharing couples project, which is a Norwegian, experimental research project in the early 1970s. The aim of the project is to promote gender equality and a better work/life balance in families. In this paper the variation in work‐sharing and post work‐sharing trajectories over the life‐course is explored, mainly focusing on the impact of the work‐sharing arrangement on the couples' relations, their work/life balance and the well‐being of participants, the core objectives of the original project.Design/methodology/approachThe original project has a small scale, interventionist design based on couples working part‐time and sharing childcare and housework; effects on family life and gender equality are documented by questionnaires and time diaries. In the follow‐up study, retrospective life‐course couple interviews with the original participants are used.FindingsRevisiting the original project produced new insights into, the subversive and radical use of sex‐role theory in early Norwegian family sociology as an instrument of changing gender relations. In the follow‐up study, the high level of participation and the long duration of the arrangement would seem to qualify for a heightened level of expectation as to the effects of the experiment on the participants' lives. A high proportion of the couples are still married, and the work‐sharing arrangement has been regarded by the majority of participants to have had a positive impact on their marital relation, work/life balance and well‐being.Practical implicationsInsights gained from revisiting this project may prove fruitful when confronting contemporary dilemmas of work/life balance, as well as demographic and environmental challenges.Originality/valueThe original project is unique internationally owing to its theoretically subversive, interventionist design and reformatory ambition. The longitudinal follow‐up of the experiment is also unique in family research, and of great value for researchers into gender equality and the family.