Abstract
During the last decades, efforts have been made to increase local support provided to victims of intimate partner violence (IPV) in Sweden. As with other social problems, responsibility to address IPV falls on the municipal personal social services. The present article draws upon data obtained via structured telephone interviews with designated personal social services staff members from a sample of 99 municipalities, focusing on aspects of potential progress in social work with IPV. The results show that successful incorporation of IPV into personal social services largely seems to depend upon the commitment and dedication of individual actors within the organisations. Furthermore, the data indicate that competence in this field depends on personal inclination, with attention to IPV appearing as ‘a matter of choice’. The results are analysed using neo-institutional theory as well as concepts related to social movement studies, with focus on individual agency in organisational change and the potential relevance of IPV as an issue related to gender inequality to gender inequality. The analysis suggests that while IPV social work may challenge institutionalised practises within social services, change may go both ways with IPV being reframed to fit within the established framework of social services.
Highlights
As in many other affluent nations, the Swedish women’s shelter movement emerged from the greater radical feminist social movement during the late 1970s
The article is based on data obtained via structured telephone interviews with staff members who formally (e.g., intimate partner violence (IPV) coordinators or frontline managers; n=54) or informally (e.g., social workers who investigate IPV cases on a regular basis or are assigned to initiate organisational change regarding IPV through the development of administrative routines, they are not given the formal title of IPV coordinators (n=45)
A Personal interest in and commitment to IPV was a recurrent theme in the interviews that was related to successful organisational adjustments, development of expertise and varying levels of IPV proficiency among frontline social workers
Summary
As in many other affluent nations, the Swedish women’s shelter movement emerged from the greater radical feminist social movement during the late 1970s. In contrast to the non-government sector, social services are bound by a large number of rules and regulations and demand professionalism and handling of social problems on an individual level (Lehrner & Allen, 2009; Mehrotra, Kimball, & Wahab, 2016; Stranz, Wiklund, & Karlsson, 2016) This implies that, as men’s violence against women has been incorporated into social services, the more political aspects of the issue as it was expressed by the feminist social movement have somewhat diminished (see Barrett, Almanssori, Kwan, & Waddick, 2016; Lehrner & Allen, 2009). As a central provider of IPV services, the women’s shelter movement has increasingly moved towards collaboration and professional legitimacy (e.g., Wies, 2008; Barrett et al, 2016; Mehrotra, et al, 2016)
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