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In this paper, I analyze the possibilities for organizing one's personal life around co-residing friendship and roommate relationships in the life course position of adulthood. The normative significance of coupledom and procreation as markers of adulthood has hardly diminished, although the nuclear family model has opened up in past decades in Euro-American countries. I argue that the close connection between coupledom and adult status sidelines communal living as a relational arrangement when persons age beyond the socially shared understanding of youth. Moreover, resisting this temporal order leads communal dwellers into a socially structured negotiation of their future trajectories, where personal autonomy in friendship and roommate relations poses an intra-relational obstacle to building a communal future. The paper is based on 31 interviews with residents of Finnish small-scale communes. Communal dwellers' negotiations of future trajectories dealt with finding someone to build their life with, whether commitment could be expected in friendship and roommate relations, and whether long-term communal living is compatible with existing housing structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine intimacy in friendship through spatio-temporalities of everyday in Finnish communal living. Based on 31 semi-structured interviews with residents of Finnish small-scale communes, I argue that the everyday in domestic space reshapes intimacies in friendship by enhancing embodied knowledge of others gathered through continuous, routine co-presence in close spatial proximity. This phenomenon, which I call domestic density, introduces intensified negotiations of affective responsibility and personal boundaries to friendship due to the increase and diversification of intimate knowledge. Although the domestic everyday has long been central in feminist discussions of personal relations, it has yet not been examined in detail how domestic space shapes friendship intimacies when friends share a common home. Domestic space entails generative particularities of its own and needs to be included in the analysis of geographies of friendship. For the research participants, the experience of intimacy in domestic space was ambivalent. Reshaping both embodied and verbal practices, the routine everyday in domestic space created novel closeness but also an experience of emotional distance. Moreover, the interviewees utilized a variety of strategies to negotiate questions of affective responsibility and personal boundaries ranging from managing one's emotions to definitions they gave to the roommate-friendship relation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disciplinary violence against children is banned by law in Finland. According to the Finnish Criminal Code, acts of disciplinary violence fall under the category of assault. In most cases, disciplinary violence fulfils at least the essential elements of petty assault. Despite these efforts, disciplinary violence is still prevalent. Previous research has also shown that authorities find it difficult to identify cases of disciplinary violence and intervene in them. Moreover, it has been found that the police culture and police officers' interpretations of policing influence police officers' attitudes and actions. Thus, the objective of this article is to examine what police officers specialised in investigating crimes against children think about the criminalisation of disciplinary violence, how they perceive disciplinary violence and whether, in their opinion, cases of disciplinary violence require a crime process. It also examines how these police officers perceive the investigation of suspected cases of disciplinary violence. The study was conducted by semi-structured focus interviews face-to-face with 12 police officers in Finland. It was found that disciplinary violence and its criminalisation provoked different opinions among the police officers. Despite their own opinions, however, the police officers knew that it was their role to investigate these cases. It was also found that, at least to some extent, police officers' perceptions of disciplinary violence are related to their actions in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disciplinary violence is banned by law in Finland, and acts of disciplinary violence fall under the category of assault. This article analyzes the accounts and justifications that parents give to justify disciplinary violence against their children. The analysis is based on child welfare documents, reports of crimes, and pretrial investigation documents from 2011. Drawing upon the techniques of neutralization and the idea of accounts, the accounts of parents are found to be split in four distinctive (yet overlapping) types which include aspects of denying either victimization or the act as such or appealing to the necessity of the forbidden act. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]