The present study aims to analyze how young people narratively negotiate their position as victims, how their social surroundings react to their victim positioning and what types of support they are offered. It is argued that those who position themselves as innocent victims receive support, while those who do not position themselves as such are left to fend for themselves. It is concluded that receiving support functions as a way for young victims to keep intact their narratives of who they are; while young people who did not receive support and acceptance for their positioning needed to re-negotiate their narrative to make sense of who they are after the victimization. Thereby, the victimizing event was incorporated into their narrative identity.
In international comparisons, Sweden is one of the countries with the lowest number of children growing up in poverty; its material standard is high, and welfare services are extensive and heavily subsidised. How child poverty can be understood in that context is interrogated in the article. The point of departure for the discussion is Swedish Save the Children’s 2013 anti-poverty campaign Fattigskolan [Poverty School]. The campaign presents child poverty from the vantage point of a welfare state and is informative for understanding normative discourses on childhood. Childhood is investigated as a social imagination that both structures children’s and parents’ everyday lives and organises society. It is argued that the dominant social imagination is based on a middle-class fantasy permeating the organisation of the welfare state. The elements of this fantasy are critical to understanding child poverty.
During recent decades, evidence-based treatment programs have become a given part of the youth justice system. Typically, such programs are evaluated through quantitative effect studies, in which a variety of outcome measures play a significant role. This case study offers an alternative, interactional evaluation of a treatment program. More specifically, the analysis focuses on an Aggression Replacement Training (ART) session that was held at a youth detention home in Sweden. In this session, two trainers and three detained adolescent boys perform an exercise that serves to teach the latter various apology practices. A detailed, conversation analytic examination of the interaction in the session shows that the trainers repeatedly problematize the boys’ contributions in a kind of deviant-making enterprise. Thus, rather than recognizing competencies that do become visible through closer inspection, the trainers one-sidedly highlight lack and deficiency. It is argued that the interpretative frame of ART, with its focus on pathologization, individualization, and responsibilization, amplifies the incarcerated boys’ deviancy, hence symbolically locking them up in a second, non-material or discursive, sense.
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