Intimate partner violence and shared custody: concerns and contradictions from the findings of a sociological research study

This paper stems from a multi-sites research study in Europe – STRESS-Mums project – that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement no 843976. The research study focuses on the transition from double parenthood to lone parenthood, and, in particular, during that transition, on the situation of judicial evaluation for child custody and courts’ decisions for allowances and other obligations. Using the approach of Institutional Ethnography (IE), this project collects data in Belgium, Italy, Spain, and the UK through discursive interviews with lone mothers, judicial professionals and gender issues experts, participant observations, document analysis, and photo-voice sessions involving mothers and professionals. IE is an empirical investigation that allows understanding the links among the local settings of everyday life (at a micro-sociological level, the informants’ standpoint), the organizations, and trans-local processes of administration and governance (the meso and macro levels). The term ‘institution’ does not refer to a type of organization, but to clusters of text-mediated relations organized around particular ruling functions. In other words, from the informants’ standpoint, IE investigates organizational processes that are coordinated by texts. With the term ‘ruling relations’, Smith (1999) indicates a complex field of coordination and control of the local experience of the informants. This paper uses data from the Italian fieldwork and focuses on the emerging need for differentiating high conflict and family violence (like intimate partner violence) and the need to understand how shared parenting works or does not work. The paper analyzes the experiences of mothers who were victims of intimate partner violence and the decisions of courts about child custody, the case management of the social services (before, during, and after the court decisions), and the practices of other institutions involved in protecting mothers, children and the relationships with the fathers. This presentation discusses how the current policies, laws, and professional guidelines affect – not always positively – the professionals’ practices inside and outside the court and the trajectories of the different family members. Furthermore, findings highlight how those professionals’ practices find difficulties in differentiating between high conflict families and family violence and in applying suitable procedures to protect family members.