In Sweden, family policies strongly promote gender equality and children’s rights. Post-separation child maintenance is underpinned by parents’ shared legal responsibility and the assumption that children benefit from contact with both parents. According to these regulations, the liable parent pays an agreed monthly amount directly to the resident parent and public authorities are not involved. However, if there is a history of violence in the family, or if the liable parent does not pay, the Swedish Social Insurance Agency (SSIA) can function as an intermediary between the parents to make sure that children receive necessary financial support. This means that parents with experiences of such problems must disclose them to the SSIA, and the need for the SSIA to step in is then re-assessed every six months.
We argue that this scheme ignores the reality of gender inequality, parental conflicts, and intimate partner violence. For this analysis, we draw on a corpus of 649 recorded phone calls (~55 hrs) from parents to the SSIA. Post-separation conflict of some kind was disclosed in 133 of these calls, which were analysed thematically. Our analysis focuses on how violence is re-actualised in separated families through regulations and routines that facilitate economic abuse. We show how the SSIA in practice encourages parents to be in contact also in cases of possible violence, which may increase risks. Meanwhile, disclosures of experiences of violence to the SSIA can be traumatic. To avoid re-actualising violence, abused parents may abstain from maintenance, which may bring financial hardship.