Beliefs that maintain violence: An Exploratory Delphi Study of expert perspectives on relational harm in Finland

This exploratory study examined how a small panel of Finnish experts describes the cultural beliefs they perceive as maintaining relational violence in Finland. A two-phase Delphi design was used. In Phase One, six practitioners and scholars with at least five years of professional experience in relational violence responded to seven open-ended questions; their verbatim responses were used to generate structured items. In Phase Two, three of those participants rated their agreement with each item on a five-point Likert-type scale. Participants described beliefs clustering around the normalization of alcohol use, expectations of masculine self-reliance and emotional restraint, an assumption that gender equality has already been achieved, and post-divorce co-parenting norms perceived as sustaining coercive control. Notably, participants did not agree that these beliefs are distinctive to Finland; items proposing Finnish specificity produced the lowest agreement in the study. Findings are interpreted through Cultural Spillover Theory. Because the panel was small and attrition across rounds was substantial, these results represent the perceptions of a few expert informants rather than consensus among Finnish professionals or a characterization of Finnish society, and are best treated as hypothesis-generating for violence prevention, counseling practice, and policy.