This article explores how staff in Swedish secure care value and understand the rightsof the children and young people in their care. To be a staff member in secure caremeans having a professional role that includes viewing and relating to young people asindividual rights holders in a setting where care and treatment shall be provided to agroup of young people. However, this occurs in an environment characterised by strongcoercive and controlling elements. The study shows that the viewing and handling ofchildren’s rights is dependent on various trade-offs that staff make. Negotiations aboutwhat should be seen as rights frequently take place, leading to tensions regardingchildren’s status as individual rights holders. The study adds knowledge about how staffdescribe the nature of these tensions in the daily life of secure care units. Implicationsfor practice are discussed.

In Sweden, 21 different state-run secure care institutions have the unique authority to offer locked wards and use restrictive measures such as solitary confinement, care in solitude and bodily search. During the last decades, inspections have repeatedly revealed poor conditions and malpractice in Swedish secure care and lately an increased use of restrictive measures, such as solitary confinement. In the circumstances of secure care staff’s complex work tasks, poor conditions and the increasing use of restrictive measures (especially of girls), we are carrying out a study with the aim to analyse scope and variation over time of the most privacy infringing restrictive measures at secure care institutions and how this is related to organisation, target group and staff’s work prerequisites, and to form an understanding of how staff balance their task to provide both safety and treatment for young people. This presentation is based on the first part of the study, containing a quantitative analyse of the use of selected restrictive measures 2008-2022. Preliminary results show a great variation between different secure care institutions, along with variation due to young people’s gender and, in some extent, age. In the presentation we will focus on how these variations can be understood in relation to target groups, organisation and policy changes.

Med en utgångspunkt i en kritisk förståelse av barns rättigheter redogör författarna för barnkonventionens innehåll och undersöker dess betydelse för det preventiva arbetet på policynivå.

Secure care in Sweden is the most intrusive child welfare intervention, and children and their family members have restricted contact. For each child in secure care, there are at least twice as many affected family members and parents who must manage the consequences of this institutionalization. Clearly, it is just as important to understand how secure care affects parents as it is to understand how secure care affects children. To address this issue, we conducted in-depth interviews with 11 parents to eight children who had been placed in secure care during their childhood, focusing on the institutional and societal structures that affected these parents and their parenting. With a narrative approach, stories alluding to a metaphor of war are identified. These stories reveal how all parents (but especially single mothers) are affected by their diverse socio-economic positions and the rigid frames of family life presumed by child welfare interventions. In these narratives, parenting emerges as a social practice rather than a skill. Above all, the stories demonstrate a great deal of vulnerability and sensitivity of parenting. The findings raise critical questions about the meaning and overarching consequences of institutional interventions in a family life.

I kapitlet ges en inledning till boken och övergripande presention om vad preventivt arbete med barn och unga innebär.

In this article I reflect on research relationships in a qualitative longitudinal (QL) project from a relational perspective, understanding agency as interdependent and evolving. My reflections are based on a study involving repeated interviews over eight years with young people who have experienced secure care, which is the most intrusive form of intervention for troubled youths in the Swedish child welfare. Research using a QL methodology requires a delicate balance in maintaining professional boundaries in relationships between the researchers and participants and emphasizes how time and place are embedded in relations. I explore the complexities of research relationships over time and the effect of repeated research encounters on understandings of time. My reflections are grouped into three themes: emotional footing, intersections of time and place, and evolving research agencies. While emotions from early encounters became a resource for my reflections as a researcher, return interviews turned me into an embodiment of time, producing linear-time narratives of progress, and the agencies of both me and young people evolved within and beyond the research project. I offer some conclusions for qualitative social work research regarding the effects of emotional, temporal and spatial dimensions on researcher vulnerability and research relationships over time.

Det finns i dag ett stort intresse för att ställa om arbetet med barn och unga utifrån ett förebyggande perspektiv. Tanken är att identifiera dem som behöver stöd i ett tidigt skede, innan problemen vuxit sig stora och svårbemästrade. Genom att tillvarata barns och ungas vardagsmiljöer, i familj, förskola, skola och under fritiden, och erbjuda insatser utan att särskilja och peka ut vissa barn som problem, finns förhoppningar om att stärka såväl de inkluderande krafterna i vardagliga sammanhang som barnets förmåga att fungera i dessa. Intresset för förebyggande arbete är inget nytt, vare sig i Sverige eller internationellt. Det nya är kraften i dess uttryck, dess omfattning och att det sker en  grundläggande omställning inom och mellan flera områden samtidigt.

Det innebär formandet av ett slags professionellt fält inom vilket specialiserade funktioner skapas och kompetens håller på att byggas upp. I detta arbete har uppbyggnaden av den teoretiska grunden för arbetet halkat efter. Med denna antologi vill författarna möta intresset för och presentera en systematiskt sammanställd kunskapsbas om preventivt arbete med barn och unga i Sverige i dag.Prevention med barn och unga vänder sig till studenter och praktiskt verksamma i socialt och pedagogiskt arbete samt andra närliggande ämnen. Boken är också av intresse för politiker och myndigheter där samtal förs och beslut fattas om förebyggande arbete.

I kapitlet summeras preventionsantologin och teoretiska implikationer för ett kritiskt preventivt arbete föreslås. 

In Sweden, the recent debate on youth crime has focused on strengthening repressive measures. At the same time, government work is underway to strengthen children’s rights. Young people who are placed for the purpose of care in secure youth care (locked institutions) are placed at the intersection of these two trends. Starting from a critical children’s rights perspective, we explore how young people understand rights in a secure care environment and discuss how these understandings relates to central principals, laws and conventions. We start from the concrete situations and contexts in which rights are to be realized in order to contribute to a better understanding of the importance of rights in a secure care environment. The empirical data consists of 15 youth interviews, at four institutions. Three understandings of rights are identified; rights as tokens where rights are seen as something symbolic and without meaning, rights as self-responsibility where rights are seen as conditional on the young people’s actions and, rights as fundamental value where rights are understood as respect for one’s own and others’ human dignity, regardless of their actions. The three understandings of rights can be linked to different care contexts and to the relationship between staff and young people. Taken together, the young people’s understandings highlight the importance of basic principles of dignity and respect on equal terms, as well as the right of children deprived of their liberty to be helped to reintegrate into society. Implications for the operation of secure youth care are highlighted.

Children’s and young persons’ rights have received increasing been focus in recent decades, due in a significant degree to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. In Sweden, compulsory care in the social-services system is disputed, not least for the forceful measures that facility personnel have at their disposal to control children in certain conflict situations. The general aim of this article is to examine how the increased emphasis in Sweden on children’s rights is promoting resilience for children and youth in youth compulsory secure-care settings. A more general question is whether the child-rights discourse leads in practice to increased resilience for children and youth in this setting, or even in general. The empirical material shows that children and young people’s perceptions of care and treatment are strongly linked to their interactions with staff and how the staff use restrictive measures. Applying Martha Fineman’s vulnerability theory in this context means that achieving resilience demands an analysis of the institutional settings in which children and young persons live their day-to-day lives, including their relationships in this setting. Comparing the legal possibilities of physical constraint with interviews of children and personnel reveals that relevant legislative frameworks and children’s-rights discourse should serve as a protection mechanism for children and youths, but in real life, these seem to have limited effect.