Whose Life is it Anyway? Exploring the Social Relations of High-Conflict Divorce Cases in Southern Norway

The paper reports on findings from an empirical study based on qualitative interviews with Norwegian parents identified as part of a high-conflict divorce situation and interviews with caseworkers from a child welfare service. The site of study is an institutional circuit of concern, assessment, and referral involving the court, child welfare services, and a public family therapy service. The paper draws on the social ontology and analytic concepts of institutional ethnography and adopts parents’ standpoint to explore how their knowledge and experience are shaped through encounters with professionals in the process of being identified and assessed as a high-conflict divorce case. The focus on people’s doings and their expert knowledge about their doings sets institutional ethnographic research apart from more conventional forms of qualitative inquiry that focus on informants’ inner experience. The paper highlights how a generalized professional discourse seems to permeate the work that parents and caseworkers jointly engage in, sometimes subsuming the knowledge and experience of those involved. When the issues of life as subjectively known and experienced are different from those of the institutional discourse, there is a danger that what is important to those whose lives they concern escapes the dialogue between parents and professionals.

De conflictscheiding als complexe gezinsproblematiek : Waarom screening op huiselijk geweld essentieel is1

High Conflict Divorce as a Complex Family Problem: Why Domestic Violence Screening is EssentialHigh Conflict Divorce form 20% of separations that involve children. These parents continue to litigate child custody and parenting arrangements, and accuse each other of child abuse, intimate partner violence, and mental health problems. The children suffer because of longstanding animosity. In this contribution, we report on a pilot study among 102 parents in a high conflict divorce, assessed at the Child Protection Council, Safe Home, or a child welfare service. The MASIC, a structured screening interview for intimate partner violence (IPV), was administered to each parent separately. Results revealed that the prevalence of different types of IPV was extremely high in our sample, and the violence kept occurring after the divorce, albeit somewhat less frequently. Our findings largely concur with international research in this area. In particular, the presence of coercive controlling violence perpetrated by one of the ex-partners, should prompt the professional to conduct further evaluation of parental and child safety. The type of IPV that emerges from the MASIC screening has implications for the advice to the parents and the family court.

Understanding Vicarious Trauma, Burnout, and Compassion Fatigue in High-Conflict Divorce

Family court–involved professionals work regularly with individuals immersed in personal and family crisis stemming from litigation and the high-conflict divorce experience. Regardless of the professional role, lawyers, judges, mediators, and mental health providers encounter clients who present with trauma-based symptoms and who, in turn, likely put the professionals who work with them at an increased risk of vicarious trauma, compassion fatigue, and burnout. This article explores the impact of working with high-conflict divorce clients on experts and strategies for self-care, boundaries, and insulation.