Mães em contexto de violência doméstica e suas percepções com relação aos filhos : narrativas biográficas de mulheres agredidas

Abstract

This thesis discusses about motherhood and marital violence. In order to help us to understand this phenomenon and find the structures of action of women in front of their children who witness domestic violence, we resorted to Interpretive Social Research. Interested in the experience of subjects who suffer domestic violence and what interpretation mothers make of their children in these relationships, I resort to the methodological approach of biographical research developed by the German researcher Gabriele Rosenthal, sociologically based on the studies of Alfred Schütz, as one of the main tools for my results. With these instruments, after going through the steps of the analysis, it was possible to reach two distinct types of interpretation about the child in cases of domestic violence. The research universe have 24 mothers, of which 15 were submitted to open interviews in Brazil and five to the United Kingdom, in addition to the 4 narrative interviews conducted in Brazil. The first Type demonstrates that the mother blames the child for entering and staying in a violent relationship and acts to penalize him, and the second Type finds in the child salvation to break up with the cycle of violence.