Mäns maktutövande och maktposition i sitt våld mot kvinnor - En kvalitativ innehållsanalys av sex utvalda domar från tingsrätter i Sverige

Interpersonal violence against women is a widely spread problem where one out of three women globally falls victim to violence during their lifetime. The Swedish government constructed 2016 six gender equality policies and one of these policies aims to violence against women to end. Despite this, there is no sign that the violence has decreased, neither in Sweden nor globally. Our empiricism consisted of six legal cases where the man was convicted of physical and/or physiological violence against the woman. The aim of this study was to through a content analysis get in-depth knowledge about the men’s use of their position of power and the power balance to use interpersonal violence. We found signs of domination techniques in all of the legal cases and therefore chose to focus on four of the most common methods; i.e. violence or threats of violence, transferring of blame and guilt, objectification, and double binding. While analyzing the legal cases using these techniques we found that men’s position of power and their exercising of power through violence not only is justified by Hirdman’s (1988, 2001) gender contract and gender system but also is romanticized in the relationship. The gender contract enabled the man to demand civil rights and create the definition of women since she’s nevertheless derived by her body. We also found that women often find themselves trapped in men’s illogical rules enabled by the man's power. The women were reduced to an object in the man’s world that he had the right to control.