EWS Honour Thy Father and Thy Mother: Violence Against Parents in the North of Europe

The project is initiated by the specialists in early modern Nordic histories to study forms and methods of intra-family violence at the origins of modern states? formation and bring this study up to the present-day. It is the focus of the group to verify the uniqueness of the Nordic family and welfare policies based on the distinct styles of policy making and attitudes to violence to compare to the other European countries and regional neighbors. The main research themes include attitudes to family power relations and hierarchies, permissibility of the usage of violence in the family, forms and types of violence against parents, gender-based analysis of violence against parents, patricides and matricides. Parents are understood as a wide category and incl ude not only natural parents, but stepparents, in-laws and adoptive parents. Early modern law and ideology did not distinguish between natural or stepparents or in-laws, however, we would like to see how these (non)distinction operated in the everyday hou sehold practices. The project's focus on the Nordic countries allows to consolidate research done by independent groups in Finland, Sweden and Denmark, to facilitate cooperation between researchers in various Nordic institutions and to make conclusions a bout the role of Nordic countries in the Northern Europe and European community. These workshops are planned to prepare a bigger joint research initiative into a longitude study of intra-family violence to apply for the EC funding (under Horizons program in 2014) and NORFACE (under Welfare State Futures)