The article examines the focus group method as a tool to study violence in youth residential care based on an empirical study of 38 young people in two Finnish reform schools. The key issue here is to reflect upon the processes of knowledge production as we trace the ways in which the institutional and situational context and the very form of focus groups affect the ways of talking about violence. Special attention is given to strong and weak themes in the focus group interviews.

This article examines young people's talk of violence to highlight the meanings of violence. Violence is approached as a fluid concept with multiple meanings. The empirical data consist of 15 focus group interviews of young people (38 young people between 12 and 17 years of age) in two Finnish reform schools carried out by two interviewers in each session. The interviews looked at the young residents' views on violence in general and on the reform schools in particular. The analysis focuses on the narrative means that the young people employed to describe violence: violence either as an instrumental means or as a form of expression. The collective nature of violence was emphasized. The results suggest that it is important to identify the multiple meanings assigned to violence for the needs of social and criminal policy and of research.

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Domestic violence is a hidden epidemic. We used a two-question screening tool to explore the prevalence of domestic violence among gynaecological outpatients. We also retrospectively assessed whether there was a change in the prevalence rate of self-reported violence after the launch of the #MeToo movement. Study design: Over an 11-month period, all gynaecological first-time visitors to our outpatient clinic were asked two dichotomous questions that screened for domestic violence and examined whether the violence had an ongoing impact on the respondent's everyday life. We used logistic regression models to assess whether the launch of #MeToo was associated with the answers to these two questions. Results: Of the 6,957 screened women, 154 (2.2 %) tested positive for domestic violence. Among the screen-positive women, 87 (56.5 %) reported that the violence affected their health and well-being. Of these 87 women, 52.9 % wanted further support and 72.4 % had already contacted psychiatric care. Out of all of the patients, the proportion of screen-positive respondents was 2.3 % before and 2.2 % after #MeToo. We did not detect increased odds of self-reporting domestic violence (odds ratio 0.97, 95 % confidence interval 0.70-1.36) or its ongoing impact on the victim's everyday life (odds ratio 1.05, 95 % confidence interval 0.53-2.07) after #MeToo. Conclusions: Our two-question screening tool detected a lower prevalence of domestic violence among gynaecological outpatients than previous reports examining the general population. Our results illustrate the dire challenges in screening for domestic violence that persist even in the post-#MeToo era. Domestic violence remains a highly intimate, stigmatising, and underreported health issue, and systematic measures to screen for and prevent it should be advocated, both in gynaecological patients and the general population.

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