Aggressive facework in disputes for the victim’s role at the Women’s Police Station in Florianópolis/SC

Abstract

The main objective of the present article is to describe and problematize the interactional construction of face in counseling sessions for couples at the Women’s Police Station, in Florianopolis. The sessions here investigated are mediated by a social assistant who acts in a way to identify the reasons that lead the couple to face marital problems. The kind of problems discussed in the counseling interactions are generally associated with the bad behavior of one of the partners, which is coherent with the general objective of those encounters, that is, to change people’s behavior. In the face of that social organization, each of the partners accounts for her/his own behavior and her/his partner’s, trying to construct a “good image” of oneself to the detriment of the other’s. Relying on interactional sociolinguistic and microethnographic perspectives, we analyze the aggressive facework in disputes for the victim’s role in the counseling sessions investigated, where facework is constructed as a delicate and moral work.

Key words: agressive facework, mediation, Women’s Police Station.