In recent years, interest in the effect and meaning of responses to domestic and other forms of interpersonal violence has surged. Institutional, local and interpersonal responses have the potential of producing and reproducing dominant understandings of violence and harm, but also of subverting and expanding them, sometimes creating grounds for recognizing new forms of harm and violence.
What inspires and instigates social responses to domestic and other forms of violence is, often, stories or narratives of such violence. Stories of past harmdoing may affect future behavior of those responsible for doing harm, because experience is simultaneously represented and (re-)constructed in the telling of narratives and the meaning-making it entails. The methodological and analytical framework for this presentation is a PhD project that will be finalized in 2019, where dialogical/thematic narrative analyses have been done in a qualitative interview study with 17 men convicted of sex offences in intimate/close relationships.
The institutional, local and interpersonal social responses that the men encountered after having committed sex offences are important factors in the processes they engage in to make sense of and come to terms with what they have done and/or were convicted of. The impact of interpersonal responses that the men discussed were highly dependent upon the quality and context of the relationship in which they were delivered. Some responses were pushing the men to re-evaluate their concepts of violation and consent, others were reinforcing experiences of having been unfairly treated by a victim-centered and over-vigilant justice system. Implications of these and other findings will be discussed in the presentation.