Children in coercive care as ‘Responsibilized Becomings’: On rights and responsibilization in the Swedish welfare state

Abstract

This study explores the often-ignored relationship between responsibilization and the welfare state, by investigating the translation of UN Convention on the Rights of the Child into Swedish legislation. Through an analysis of official political documents and interviews with Members of Parliament, this article identifies the driving forces behind the responsibilization of children in coercive care and seeks to explain how these forces are used to conceptualize and reconceptualize the rights of children in these settings. By proposing that the responsibilization of these children is closely connected to the internal logic of the welfare state, and that this logic is working in tandem with neoliberalization (rather than against it), this article provides an important contribution to the debate regarding the welfare state and responsibilization in Sweden, and by extension in the Nordic context.

Keywords

Children's rights coercive confinement neoliberalism responsibilization coercive care welfare state

Introduction

Sweden is often portraited as a pioneer when it comes to the rights of the child (Leviner, 2018; Schoultz, 2014). The country was among the first to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (hereafter referred to as ‘the convention’) in 1990 and on 1 January 2020 the convention was incorporated into Swedish law. While the incorporation of the convention has set off a range of proposed legislative changes aiming at strengthening the rights of the child, it has also reviled contradictions within Sweden's approach to rights. This is illustrated in a question posed by a conservative Member of Parliament (MP) to the Minister of Health and Social Affairs: ‘[w]ill the Minister do something about the consequences of the convention for Swedish legislation in general, and coercive care in particular?’ (Weinerhall, 2020). According to the MP, the convention is preventing what it seen as necessary use of forced measures within the coercive care of children (Weinerhall, 2020). Hence, on the one hand children, in general, are to be empowered through the translation of the convention into national law. On the other hand, this process is portrayed as an obstruction to the use of necessary force, where children are responsibilized by promoting rights and social justice as conditional on good behaviour (c.f., Kemshall, 2008). This indicates that the recognition of children as rights holders and autonomous subjects in Sweden is not only used to empower children but also to enhance their responsibility (c.f., Lister, 2007; Reynaert et al., 2012).

This study investigates these indications by exploring the often-ignored relationship between responsibilization and the welfare state in the translation of the convention into coercive care legislation. It identifies the driving forces behind the dualistic dynamic between empowerment and responsibilization of children in coercive care and explains how these forces are used to conceptualize and reconceptualize the rights of children in these settings. By situating the contemporary responsibilization of children in a historical and cultural context, this article problematizes the idea that neoliberalism undermines the Swedish welfare state and contributes to a view of the poor as both unworthy and responsible for their situation (e.g., Ekendahl et al., 2020; Lauri, 2016; Sheerup and Ålund, 2011, c.f., Wacquant, 2009). Additionally, this study engages with the so-called exceptionalism literature and its claim that strong welfare states like Sweden rely less on punishment, favouring welfare mechanisms instead (Pratt, 2008), as well as with its critics (e.g., Barker, 2018, Barker and Smith, 2021). Doing so, this article contributes to the literature identifying what is preventing the evolution of children's rights within practices of coercive care, and in a broader sense to the debates about the welfare state, neoliberalism, and coercive confinement within the Nordic context.

The article begins by offering a contextualization of coercive care and the rights of the child in the Swedish welfare state, after which I move on to engage in a critical discussion of responsibilization in relation to the welfare state and neoliberalism, and outline my methodological approach. The subsequent analysis of interviews with MP's and policy documents identifies the driving forces behind the responsibilization of children in coercive care as a protection of both current and future society. It explains how the rights of these children are recontextualized as conditioned on security and how this process is closely connected to the internal moral logic of social worth within the welfare state, that are at times working in tandem with neoliberal practices. The final section discusses these findings in a broader context.

Coercive care of children in Sweden as a form of coercive confinement

The Swedish welfare state is based on a collectivist ideology involving state responsibility to protect citizens and ensure social rights (Kotkas, 2017). It is important to note that coercive care, which is regulated in the Care of Young Persons Act, is not a part of criminal law or the penal system but is a welfare service, a piece of protective legislation – and a social right.

Children may be placed in coercive care in two cases: One is the so-called environmental case, where the living environment is considered harmful to the child's health or development, for example as a result of inadequate parenting. If placed due to such concerns, the child is usually placed in a foster home or at an open care institution. The other type of case is referred to as the behavioural case. Here, it is the behaviour of the children themselves that is considered harmful to their health or development, for example, as a result of run-away behaviour, self-harm, drugs, or criminal activity.

In the behavioural case social services can place the child at institutions monitored by the public agency the National Board of Institutional Care (NBIC). These locked institutions, which constitute the focus of this article, resemble other secure institutions, such as prisons (Stenström and Pettersson, 2021). For instance, staff have the legal authority to implement so-called forced measures such as body and room searches, isolation cells, restrictions on electronic communications, and taking blood and urine samples. The buildings are usually locked, surrounded by high fences with barbed wire and bullet-proof glass or bars covering the windows, and they are located in the countryside far from any neighbours or community. Each year approximately 1000 children and youths are placed in this type of coercive care. There are no available data on national or ethnic background of these children, however, of those placed in locked care during 2020, 71% were born in Sweden and 62% has Swedish as their first language (National Board of Institutional Care, 2021). Broadly, this group of children is described as heterogenic with complex needs, and 7 out of 10 children have at least one psychiatric diagnosis (The Swedish Agency for Public Management, 2022).

While a decision to apprehend a child following the Care of Young Persons Act is determined by the administrative court, deciding whether to place the child at an open or locked institution is in the hands of the social services. Being considered a ‘social right’, coercive care provided by the NBIC is found under what would be categorized as welfare investment, or more precisely in the category ‘health care, medical care and social care’ in the state budget (Government, 2020a). The legislation is thus viewed as protective, and as providing social rights to the most vulnerable children and youths under the age of 21, however, it is often perceived as a punishment by the children themselves (Stenström and Pettersson, 2021). Hence, the practice constitutes a form of coercive confinement (c.f., O’Donnell and O'Sullivan, 2020). Situating the coercive care of children within the framework of coercive confinement embraces the importance of considering institutions that, with the words of O’Donnell and O'Sullivan (2020:) ‘…fall outside the remit of the formal criminal justice system’, which is necessary if we are to fully grasp a society's penal culture.

Children's rights within the Swedish welfare state

In Sweden's sixth and seventh periodic reports to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the view of children as autonomous actors is stressed, emphasizing the need to strengthen young people's possibilities for active participation. Here, the NBIC is mentioned as one of the agencies tasked with promoting children's involvement and participation in democracy (Ministry of Employment, 2021). Looking back at the development of children's rights, paternalism – rather than autonomy – has been viewed as the prevalent approach both internationally (Hanson and Peleg, 2020) and in Sweden (Lundström, 2017). From a paternalistic viewpoint, children are considered future citizens and their rights are limited to the right to be protected by parents or by the state, while interventions are legitimized by the need to protect children from themselves or from others (Hanson, 2012). From this perspective, the Care of Young Persons Act, being a piece of protective legislation, may be called paternalistic legislation. However, the translation of the convention into Swedish legislation adds a new dimension commonly categorized as participation: The recognition of children's civil and political rights. This dimension challenges the foundation of the Swedish child welfare system, being based on a paternalistic view of protection and provision (Hanson, 2012; Hanson and Peleg, 2020; Heimer and Palme, 2016). In this regard, as James (2011) has noted, the convention also challenges Marshall's notion of children as citizens in potentia, that is, a notion of children as incomplete and incompetent citizens (cf. Cockburn, 1998; Lister, 2006, 2007). Lister (2007) conceptualizes this as children as ‘being’ citizens here and now, rather than as having the potential to ‘become’ citizens in the future. A view of children as ‘being’ involves viewing children as competent actors. Together, this development proposes an ongoing shift within the Swedish state from paternalistic claims and a view of children as incompetent to a view of children as autonomous beings (c.f., Reynaert et al., 2012).

These three dimensions are commonly conceptualized as the three pillars of the Convention: Protection, Provision and Participation (Heimer and Palme, 2016). As of Swedens ratification and lately the incorporation of the convention into law, these pillars must be considered holistically and given equal importance in legislative decision making. However, studies have shown that Sweden's ratification of the convention has had little impact on civil and political rights, such as the rights of children in the welfare system to participate in and influence decisions that directly concern them (Enell, 2009; Eriksson and Näsman, 2011; Heimer and Palme, 2016; Leviner, 2011, 2018). There are also indications that an increased focus on children as rights holders and autonomous actors is used to legitimize increased uses of force. In her dissertation Lina Ponnert (2007) shows how the view of the ‘autonomous child’ is used to legitimize placements in locked care, as children are responsibilized for their behaviour to a larger extent.

Although the convention was ratified the same year as the current Care of Young Persons Act came to force in 1990, it was not until 2015 that the government initiated a transformation of the legislation in accordance with the rights of the child. However, this transformation has had little impact on the rights of children in locked coercive care. In fact, a study on the transformation of the coercive care legislation illustrates how children's right to protection is used to legitimize an expansion of forced measures at NBIC (Rennerskog, 2021). Simultaneously the protective (paternalistic) strand in Swedish child welfare legislation is claimed to stand strong as its primary approach (Heimer et al., 2018; Leviner, 2018).

Responsibilization – a core feature of the welfare state?

The basic assumption in the responsibility debate is that previous support provided by another, usually the welfare state, has been retrenched. This enforces individual self-reliance in a society where social rights are conditional on good behaviour, which is in itself a result of neoliberal practices (O’Malley, 2009). Within the child's rights literature, this is characterized as a ‘shift from the responsibility of the government to support children in their development of autonomy towards children and parents themselves expecting to take responsibility’ (Reynaert et al. 2012: 160). A critique directed towards this shift is that it presupposes behaviours that are in line with a normative assumption of a ‘good’ citizen. When these expectations are not met, children are made responsible for their behaviour (Reynaert et al., 2012). Critical scholars debating the relationship between neoliberalism and rights have argued that responsibilization promotes rights and social justice as conditional (Kemshall, 2008), resulting in a ‘something for something society’ (Jordan, 1998: 42) in which ‘rights are matched with responsibilities’ (Goldson and Muncie, 2006: 204). As has been argued by Kemshall (2008: 25), ‘[r]ights also carry a moral imperative with emphasis upon civic obligation, active citizenship and personal responsibility’, and often include a clear disciplinary element through self-regulation (see also Ekendahl et al., 2020; Goddard and Myers, 2017).

It is this basic assumption of neoliberalization causing welfare state retrenchment and increased individual responsibilization that I now set out to investigate. In doing so, I want to bring together insights from different disciplines (criminology, sociology and history) where a different responsibilization debate might be sketched out. I begin by returning to the Swedish welfare state, commonly categorized as universal (Esping-Andersen, 1990), and two well-known (and sometimes interrelated) ideas. Firstly, the idea established within the exceptionalism literature, that a strong welfare state leads to a mild and humane penal order (Pratt, 2008) and secondly, within the neoliberal penalty thesis, that neoliberalism has forced a welfare state retrenchment leading to an expansion of penal power and an increased responsibilization of individuals (Wacquant, 2009).

One of several Nordic scholars that has questioned both these ideas is Barker (2018) who conceptualizes the ‘internal logic’ of the Swedish welfare state as a national project with exclusionary functions driven by penal nationalism (see also Smith and Ugelvik, 2017). According to this logic, social rights are conditional on legal residency and need to be safeguarded and protected and external threats are met with exclusionary strategies, such as border security and immigration control, to keep welfare state's integrity and ‘restore the health and functioning of the society’ (Barker (2018: 47). In a recent study Barker and Smith (2021) further develop these ideas as they unpack what they call the punishment-welfare nexus. They argue that features praised and associated with the welfare state – comprehensiveness, universalism and generosity – are the driving forces behind exclusionary mechanisms directed towards outsiders, especially immigrants. According to Barker and Smith (2021: 1541) Denmark's increasingly punitive approach to immigration is ‘not a dramatic break with the past or the ideals of Nordic exceptionalism. Rather, they expose the resilient structures of a Nordic society that are far more conditional, exclusionary and nationalistic than conventionally understood—features that exacerbate penal power when faced with existential threats from outsiders’. Drawing on the idea of the welfare state as a national(ist) project I attempt to take Barkers investigation of the welfare state's internal logic one step further by focusing, not on its exclusionary mechanisms but on one of the welfare states’ inclusionary (but coercive) mechanisms: coercive care. Being a social right and categorized as welfare service and a welfare investment in the state budget, I argue that coercive care must be viewed as an inclusionary welfare mechanism.

Directing our focus towards this inclusionary (coercive) mechanism we must first revisit the moral values that distinguish between the deserving and the underserving (of social rights), which can be traced back to the poor laws of post-reformation Europe that continue to influence western welfare states today (Hasenfeld, 2000; Levin, 2008; Watts, 2018). Moral values that the so-called universal welfare state have not only failed to abolish, but also have actively used and administered on behalf of the best interest of the society. Looking back at the development of the Swedish welfare state, the social rights of marginalized groups have always been conditional on good behaviour (Åmark, 2005; Barker, 2018). Hence, the evaluation of individuals’ social worth and responsibility is not something that has ‘emerged’ in the Swedish public discourse caused by a neoliberalization of social policy as has been argued by some (Herz and Lalander, 2018; Julunen and Harder, 2004; Lauri, 2016). On the contrary, moral obligations and the welfare state have developed together, and are still centralized around work and the present or future wage-earner (Åmark, 2005).

Not surprisingly, the role of children in the developing welfare state is also connected to work. With industrialization and urbanization, the population within cities increased and the working class’ children became visible. The childcare legislation of 1924, which is often described as the ‘birth’ of modern child welfare, was directed towards behaviours described as morally deviant (Lundström, 1993). What was ‘new’ for this time was that interventions should be carried out, not only towards already criminal children, but towards those at risk of becoming a threat to the honourable and hard-working society (Lundström, 1993). Over the last century, three things have remained more or less the same. First, the two categories of children which the 1924 child welfare legislation targeted are the same: the environmental case and the behavioural case (Lundström, 1993). Second, which this article illustrates, although the aim of societal protection was formally abolished in 1980 (Lundström, 2017), references to the best interests of the society are still used to legitimize changes in the coercive care legislation and to limit children's access to rights. Third, what is in the best interest of society remains the good wage-earner (cf. Åmark, 2005). This became evident in the installation speech made by the new Social Democratic prime minister, Magdalena Andersson, on 5 November 2021, in which she painted a picture of Sweden as a place where everyone has a part to play, even children – the future wage-earners: ‘[i]t is about children seeing their parents working and contributing to the building of society. There is pride, important role models, but also an insight about what will one day be expected of you’ (Ekot, 2021). Andersson declared that ‘[w]ith work and income comes the liberty to decide for yourself’ (Ekot, 2021). Freedom and autonomy under responsibility – is the best interests of society.

Andersson's speech echoes the traditional Swedish welfare state project, extending individual autonomy through the state, while demanding something (workforce, taxes) in return. This investment in human capital ties the individual closely to the fate of the nation and makes it strongly future oriented (c.f., Barker, 2018). Berggren and Trägårdh (2006) conceptualize this as ‘Swedish state individualism’, which often seems to be confused with neoliberal values of activation, self-regulation and individual responsibility. This is not a surprise, since neoliberalism is usually linked to welfare state retrenchment and deregulation. However, to better understand the relationship between the welfare state and neoliberalism I follow Brenner et al. (2010: 330) who suggest thinking about neoliberalization as ‘a variegated form of regulatory restructuring’, as a ‘syndrome of processes and activities’ rather than a distinct phenomenon. From this perspective the process of neoliberalization, which has been highly influential in Sweden, should be seen as one thing among several competing processes rather than as something that represents all aspects of regulatory restructuring (Brenner et al., 2010). This perspective invites an analysis of the relationship between the welfare state and neoliberalism that is more sensitive to different types of responsibilizations.

What I suggest is that we must regard the Swedish welfare state as a national project with both exclusionary (such as border control, c.f., Barker, 2018) and inclusionary coercive mechanisms (such as coercive care) that face those who fail to qualify as (potentially) productive members of the welfare state. Regarding the latter, responsibilizing individuals and demanding something in return is part of the internal logic of the welfare state (Barker, 2018). A logic that, as will become evident below, at times works in tandem with neoliberal practices of activation and self-regulation.

Research strategy

The empirical material consists of both official political documents and qualitative interviews that have been conducted through purposive sampling. This means that documents and interviewees have been selected with the purpose of gathering in-depth knowledge of the implementation process of the convention into coercive care legislation (Meyer and Mayrhofer, 2022). The sample includes all political motions written by MPs between January 2020 and July 2021 that included any of the following search terms: Care of Young Persons Act, coercive care, youth care, youth home. This search resulted in 36 motions, which have all been included in the study. For those who are not familiar with the Swedish legislative process, motions are propositions written by individual members of the parliament or by political parties. These are first sent to one of the 17 parliamentary committees, which then formulate a report suggesting how the chamber should vote on the matter. Thereafter, the chamber's decision is reported to the government, which executes the decision. The reasons for including motions in the analysis are based on my interest in understanding the convention's influence on policy process rather than on government decision making. Motions are usually less ‘polished’ than governmental bills and reports. They commonly include illustrative examples and express strong feelings, making them analytically useful for the aims of this study. To contextualize these motions, the study also includes a public letter and two reports from the Committee of Health and Welfare, together with a public hearing organized by the committee and a protocol from a parliamentary debate. In addition, one public letter from parliament has been included since this constitutes a response to the committee's work. Together, these documents represent all the (written) work that has been executed within the parliament on the rights of children in locked coercive care during the given time frame. The political parties within the Swedish parliament are traditionally divided into two blocks, with the Moderate Party, Christian Democrats and the Liberal Party on the conservative right-wing side and the Social Democrats, Environmental Party and the Left Party on the left-wing side. There is also the nationalistic party Sweden Democrats that are usually placed on the far right.

Additionally, I have conducted a total of five interviews with MPs. The MPs were contacted on the basis that they had written several motions on the convention and coercive care of children, thus showing they have a personal interest in the matter, and hence being able to provide expert knowledge of the implementation process. The interviewees represent four different parties (Left Party, Centre Party, Christian Democrats and Moderate Party), and two different committees – the Committee on Justice (referred to as the Justice Committee) and the Committee on Health and Welfare (referred to as the Welfare Committee). These two committees receive the majority of the motions relating to coercive care. While the Welfare Committee have the formal responsibility for political questions regarding coercive care, as the practice is considered a welfare service, the Justice Committee, which handles questions on crime and punishment, are heavily engaged in the matter. This illustrates how coercive care is placed in a grey zone between care and punishment in practice, while it is considered a social right in theory. The interviews followed a thematically open approach centred on themes anchored in the convention (Holstein and Gubrium, 1995). Prior to collecting any empirical material, the study was approved by the Swedish Ethical Review Authority.

The text (both political documents and interview transcripts) was analysed as a unit through a thematic analysis. This method is used to identify, organize, describe and analyse themes found in the empirical material (Braun et al., 2019). My approach to thematic analysis is reflexive, drawing on Braun et al. (2019: 848), who conceptualize themes as ‘meaning-based patterns, evident in explicit (semantic) or conceptual (latent) ways, and as the output of coding’. The coding process is not fixed from the beginning, but has evolved throughout the analytical process. For instance, an initial code can be divided into several different codes, combined with others, and new codes can evolve. In the case of this study, the coding process has been both deductive and inductive. It has been deductive since I started out with a few predefined codes, which initially guided the analytical process (as recommended by King, 2004). These initial codes were inspired by the work of Heimer et al. (2018), who propose a framework for analysing child welfare based on the three pillars of the convention, the so-called three Ps: Protection, Provision and Participation. Given that these pillars must be considered holistically and given equal importance in legislative decision making as of the incorporation of the convention into Swedish law, categorizing the material around these themes was a way to approach understanding the policy process. Thus, an initial deductive coding of the material was made along the three Ps. For instance, suggestions to increase quality of care have been categorized as provision, while arguments to limit access to electronic communication have been categorized as participation. As the analytical process proceeded, other themes were found and codes generated inductively ‘from the bottom up’ (Braun et al., 2019) while being attuned to the study's theoretical framework. Some were categorized as sub-themes to one of the three Ps, such as ‘disciplinary participation’, while for instance ‘society's safety’ and ‘security’ are combined within all main themes. In this process a third main theme was generated: ‘The responsible versus the responsibilized child’. In the following section, the analysis is structured around the four main themes that connect the empirical material to the theoretical framework: ‘The responsible versus the responsibilized child’, ‘Protection of current and future society’, ‘Provision – conditional on security’ and ‘Participation – a safety threat and a disciplinary function’. The first theme is based solely on empirical material from interviews and the other three themes include materials from both interview and documents. Although the different empirical sources have been analysed together as a unit, which means that I treat all material as text, material from interviews are easily distinguished from the documents in the analysis as they are referred to as ‘MP, party, committee’, for example ‘MP, Centre Party, Welfare Committee’. While the theoretical freedom of thematic analysis can be viewed as a limitation, it has also proven to be a great advantage that has permitted a combination of theoretical perspectives from different bodies of literature, enabling a nuanced examination of rights, responsibilities and the welfare state.

The responsible versus the responsibilized child

Initially, the MPs that I talked to described how children's rights have undergone a shift from being a ‘blind spot’ to gaining increased attention across political party lines. The members of the Welfare Committee all described how a unique strategy based on unity regarding what questions to prioritize has developed within the committee. The member from the Christian Democrats explained how they choose only to spend time and energy on questions that the different parties can unite around. According to my interviewees, the rights of the child placed in coercive care are one of these unifying questions.

When asked whether this unity included children placed in locked care based on the behavioural case, the answer was no. These were described as two separate phenomena. While the environmental case was described as an ‘obvious issue’ (MP, Left party, Welfare Committee), my interviewees from the Welfare Committee explained that the rights of children placed as a result of their own behaviour are ‘not something that has been up for discussion’ (MP, Centre Party, Welfare Committee) due to the lack of consensus on this issue. Hence, the rights of these children do not fit neatly into the established strategy of only focusing on questions that unite rather than divide. The core feature that seems to separate children placed on the basis of the environmental case from children placed in locked care is responsibility. This responsibility is related to the moral blame that can be attached to them for their destructive behaviour (c.f., Kemshall, 2008).

I think it's about when the responsibility passes to the youths themselves and whether one should consider them more as a criminal or as a youth or a child. I think that when it comes to young people, then this view of responsibility begins, and that's where the differences are (MP, Left Party, Welfare Committee)

The notion of responsibility creates a dichotomy between ‘children’ and ‘criminals’, where the latter – criminals – are to be blamed for their own actions regardless of whether or not they have been charged for any crime. This dichotomy was further illustrated by the MP from the Centre Party, who described children placed on the basis of the environmental case as ‘especially vulnerable…so we really have to do something for them’, while children placed on the basis of the behavioural case were described as children ‘…you don’t feel sorry for in the same way’. This group become ‘responsibilized’ specifically by being placed on the basis of the behavioural case and are thus not included in the committee's ‘rights talk’.

While the work of the Welfare Committee is based on a political strategy of ‘unity’ that disqualifies the rights of children placed in locked care from the agenda, the Justice Committee focuses specifically on these children. However, not on their rights. While the convention was described by members of the Welfare Committee as a breakthrough, none of the members of the Justice Committee believed it to have had any impact on the work of their committee. The MP from the Moderate Party explicitly stated that ‘I cannot think of any legislative proposals where the convention has had any impact’. The MP from the Left Party in the Justice Committee declared that the rights of the child were given no room within their committee, stating ‘[t]hat [the convention] is nothing I come across, if I were to fight for such issues I would be accused of pampering’. The political tactic is to be tough, or at least to play tough, and to let the Welfare Committee handle ‘the soft questions’ (MP, Left Party, Justice Committee).

Clearly, political tactics differ significantly between the two committees. Instead of looking for unity, the members of the Justice Committee whom I spoke to described a climate of polarization and antagonism – ‘[w]e don’t discuss, we debate’, as one interviewee declared (MP, Left Party, Justice Committee). However, what these tactics have in common is avoiding attributing rights to children who are placed as a result of their own behaviour. Neither the political tactic of unity at the Welfare Committee nor the political tactic of antagonism at the Justice Committee leaves any space for the rights of the ‘responsibilized’ child.

Protection of current and future society

The category of protection includes articles that recognize children's right to be protected from all forms of violence, maltreatment, exploitation and conflicts as well as to the protection necessary for children's well-being. Several parties describe the coercive care legislation as the ‘ultimate tool’ for society to ensure children's protection, and there was general agreement that children under the protection of society must not be exposed to harm: all political parties call for an increase in the level of state responsibility. However, when what is proposed is examined more closely, it is a responsibility that should be taken, or performed, through increased security, and primarily via increased perimeter protection, that is, increased surveillance, fences and alarm systems (Centre Party, 2020a; Christian Democrats, 2020a; Liberal Party, 2020a; Moderate Party, 2020a; Sweden Democrats, 2020; see also Committee on Health and Welfare, 2020b; Government, 2021). This tells us that it is not primarily the individual child who is to be protected, but rather that society itself is to be kept safe – from said child.

Although security has always been on the agenda, it has been ascribed increasing importance since the beginning of 2020. In October 2020, the NBIC was given a formal mandate to increase their level of security (Government, 2020b). This increased focus on security was partly related to an increase in the number of youths absconding from NBIC during the spring and summer of 2020. This increase in absconding was not, however, found among children who had been placed by reference to the Care of Young Persons Act, but rather children placed with the NBIC based on the Secure Care Act. In contrast to the coercive care legislation, the Secure Care Act is a part of the criminal justice system and relates to a specific criminal sanction for children who have committed serious crimes. These children are placed with the NBIC because the general view has been that children should not be placed in prison.

Although the absconding of children placed based on the Care of Young Persons Act has decreased over recent years (National Board of Institutional |Care, 2019, 2020), the increased focus on security encompasses the agency as a whole. Even when severe organizational problems are emphasized, such as violence and abuse, the answer is increased security: according to the government ‘[a] good perimeter protection and a good and stable security organization is important to avoid misconduct, breakouts and absconding’ (Government, 2020a: 168; see also Christian Democrats, 2020b). Security via increased perimeter protection is thus seen as a general solution. Although references to protection are made, the focus is not on the protection of the child from harm, but the protection of society from these children. This exemplifies the strong interventionist state taking responsibility and showing political efficacy (cf. von Hofer and Tham, 2013).

Moreover, it is not only today's society that must be protected, but tomorrow's as well. A picture portraying these children as future ‘becomings’ who pose a threat to the best interests of society is painted across party lines:

Social vulnerability and exclusion are a scourge for those affected, but also for society at large. The vulnerability of adults also risks becoming children's vulnerability. Growing up with parents who do not go to work must never be the beginning of a life in which you yourself never have the chance to do so. (Moderat|e Party, 2020a: 8)

What is at stake here is not the protection of the child from harms, but the protection of future society and the future wage-earner. Increased security and perimeter protection is thus seen as the best means of ensuring the best interests of society, which is also in the best interests of the child.

Provision – conditional on security

The provision articles are to do with children's social rights to minimum standards of health care and rehabilitation, education and leisure. The quality of care and rehabilitation at the NBIC has been criticized for being inadequate for a long time, and motions included in the present analysis illustrate an awareness of this as well as a willingness to act. Parties across the political divide argue for care and rehabilitation, by calling for increased quality of care, better educated staff and more research (Centre Party, 2020a; Christian Democrats, 2020a; Green Party, 2020; Left Party, 2020; Liberal Party, 2020c; Social Democrats, 2020b). This is mirrored in the two reports from the Welfare Committee as well as in the parliamentary debate and the public letter from the government (Committee on Health and Welfare, 2020a, 2020b; Government, 2021; Swedish Parliament, 2020). However, I found the perspective of provision to be closely related to security. For instance, in the section on Quality of Care the government emphasizes current deficiencies in the care and treatment offered at the NBIC. To come to terms with these, the government points to what has been done with regard to ‘the new security unit, increased perimeter protection, more and more modern CCTV, and so on’ (Government, 2021: 45). Similarly, the Moderate Party (2020a: 18) discuss ‘quality of care’ and ‘security’ as being closely linked:

That this organization is of high quality and security is of the utmost importance when it comes to providing care and treatment…It is absolutely fundamental that NBIC-institutions ensure that people cannot escape from coercive care […]

The Moderate Party further proposed that the government initiate a broader review of the quality and security of coercive care, which should look at the possibility of transferring the responsibility to the Prison and Probation Service. This was also proposed by the Committee on Justice (2019) in a declaration from 2019. Such a change would enable placing children identified via a welfare intervention within the penal system. According to the Moderate Party, these children must receive help (provision), however, the focus should be placed on incarceration, surveillance and control, with reference to these children constituting a danger to both themselves and society. This proposal reflects an important ideological break within the welfare state, namely of the fundamental ‘division of labour’ between child welfare and criminal justice, as expressed by Lappi-Seppälä (2018). However, it is not a proposal that involves a welfare retrenchment, but one that is based on an assumed need for increased protection for society, which requires more stringent interventions. While the primary (and formal) task of the NBIC is to protect the child, the primary task of the Prison and Probation Service is to protect society. While the two interviewees from the Left Party emphasized the traditional trend in Sweden of keeping children out of the penal system, and of focusing on care and treatment, the interviewees from the other parties were of a different opinion. Although care and treatment were said to be important, they were viewed as being conditional on security – of which the penal system is viewed as the best provider. The interviewee from the Christian Democrats explained:

This [security] exists within the Prison and Probation Service. Well, then you must use it [the prison system]. That this would be a big shift in paradigm is wrong, it's still about the law, that's what matters.

(Christian Democrats, Welfare Committee)

The argument that ‘It's still about the law’ indicates that the Care of Young Persons Act is still considered a piece of welfare legislation, but should be implemented through the penal system, since the most important condition for care is security. According to this line of reasoning, the fact that these children have not been charged with any offenses is no obstacle to such a development. This is not an illustration of the rise of the penal state and the retrenchment of the welfare state, but is rather a blurring of the lines between the two, motivated by the need for increased security – in the best interests of the child and the society. This blurring evidences a space where paternalistic and collectivistic claims unite, motivated by the goal of creating a safe society.

Participation – a safety threat and a self-regulatory function

The category of participation refer to children’s political and civil rights such as the right to be heard and have a say in decisions that concern them, but also to the right to information via the internet, radio and television. In my examination of all the motions where the coercive care legislation is discussed subsequent to the convention being incorporated into Swedish law in January 2020, I found that the strengthening of civil and political rights was argued for exclusively in relation to the environmental case. As for children placed with the NBIC, the convention is viewed in a different light:

According to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, [the convention] gives children and young people rights that they may not have had before. Many are obviously good, but some can be directly destructive and contribute to young people maintaining a criminal lifestyle. (Moderate Party, 2020c: 2)

Examples of such ‘destructive parts’ of the convention are, according to the Moderate Party (2020c), the right to so-called ‘status items’ and access to a phone or the internet. While ‘status items’ are not specified, access to phones and the internet falls under Article 17 in the convention, which provides children with the right to information. Several parties call for limitations on the right to information in terms of the denial of access to a phone and the internet (Liberal Party, 2020a; Moderate Party, 2020b, 2020d). Even e-book readers are viewed as ‘risk items’ (Sweden Democrats, 2020). According to the Christian Democrats, access to such items constitutes ‘an enormous security risk’ for staff, for people passing by [the institutions], and for society in general (Christian Democrats, 2020b: 10). It should be noted that staff are able to restrict the use of internet and mobile phones if this is considered a risk to the safety of the child or others at the institution. Such decisions must be re-examined every 2 weeks. The argument made in the motions is that this is too often. According to an individual motion from the Social Democrats (2020a), the right to information and freedom of expression is given too much weight in these cases. Further, the fact that staff sign decisions and medical journal notes is seen as a threat to staff safety. This individual motion called for anonymous decision making and journal notes, since staff today must ‘expose their name to, in the worst case, inmates with links to organized crime […] to come to terms with the problem demands that increased consideration is given to the personal integrity of staff’ (2020a: 1–2). In these cases, participatory rights are viewed as a safety problem for staff, and for society.

Additionally, the right to be heard was mentioned within what could be viewed as an empowering framework in the official letter from the Swedish Parliament (Government, 2021). According to the government, the goal is that treatment plans for children in locked care should be formulated in dialogue with said children. However, the government holds the opinion that the tools required to involve children in decision making are already in place: ‘[s]uch a claim [on rights] can be made in different ways and there are, according to the government's assessment, a number of procedures for this’ (Government, 2021: 47). These procedures are described in terms of opportunities for children to ‘formulate goals’, ‘evaluate their progress’ and ‘engage in youth councils’ (Government, 2021: 47). Although one might argue that this could be understood as empowering, since children are being given the opportunity to express their voice, it could also be understood from the perspective of responsibilization. These strategies clearly have self-regulatory functions. They follow the internal logic of the welfare state by requiring engagement in a legitimate activity as well as good behaviour to be given access to rights, while also following neoliberal practices of creating opportunities to self-regulation. Rather than ensuring unconditional rights, the internal logic of the welfare state thus works in tandem with neoliberal activities to safeguard the interests of society. This differs significantly from the way children's civil and political rights is discussed within the environmental case. Within this narrative, children are portrayed as ‘competent human beings’ (Liberal Party, 2020c: 7), who must be ensured the right to be heard and to participate – without demanding anything in return.

Children as ‘responsible beings’ or ‘responsibilized becomings’ – a logical continuity of the welfare state

This study has taken the incorporation of convention into Swedish legislation as its starting point to explore the often-ignored relationship between responsibilization and the welfare state. It identified driving forces behind the dynamic of empowerment and responsibilization of children in coercive care, and explained how these forces are used to conceptualize and reconceptualize the rights of children in these settings. The main findings provide an important contribution to the debate on the welfare state and responsibilization in Sweden in particular, as well as in a Nordic context in general.

While the analysis has illustrated an initial consensus among MPs to empower children, it is a consensus that only includes children who cannot be morally blamed for their situation. As soon as problematic behaviour enters the picture, this consensus fades and children are responsibilized for their situation instead. One consequence of the political strategies developed in the Welfare Committee, to only engage in questions that unite them, and in the Justice Committee, not to engage in questions that are considered ‘soft’, is the lack of a space for the rights of children who are placed at NBIC. This absence opens the door for multiple responsibilities and responsibilizations that are driven by one goal – to safeguard the best interests of society. For children who can be morally blamed for their behaviours, irrespective of whether arguments are made in terms of protection, provision or participation, rights are conceptualized as conditional on physical security. It seems safe to argue that in this domain of social policy, security has replaced protection and provision as the prevalent approach (c.f., Hanson, 2012; Hanson and Peleg, 2020).

The general idea behind the division between empowerment and responsibilization (Left Party excluded) seems to be that rights are to be deserved. Notably, what was framed as being in the best interests of the child was closely linked to what was in the best interests of society. The logic is as follows: the social security of society is protected via the use of increased security in relation to problematic children – making it in the best interests of these children as future ‘becomings’, as well (cf. Lister, 2007; Stasiulis, 2002; Such and Walker, 2005). Hence, the problem, as well as the solution, starts with the child. A child is at once the cause and the consequence of societal breakdown, and the protection of future society is reduced to placing restrictions on individual acts here and now (through increased perimeter protection), rather than focusing on structural concerns.

To a large extent, this view of the problematic child is a political debate regarding morals (cause) and symptoms (consequence), distinguishing the deserving from the underserving (c.f., Hasenfeld, 2000; Levin, 2008, Lunström, 1993). The relationship between empowerment and responsibilization cannot only be explained by the neoliberal mechanisms of the responsibilization-debate, rather, it is an evaluation of social worth, which opens up a multiplicity of responsibilities. The responsible child placed based on the environmental case, who is accorded high social worth and deserving of rights and autonomy, is contrasted with the responsibilized child, who by reference to personal choice can be blamed for their behaviour and viewed as being undeserving of rights. This actualizes the state's responsibility to empower the deserving child, and to responsibilize the undeserving.

This re-contextualization of the rights of the child has made it possible to make security the prevalent approach in relation to locked coercive care. This is, needless to say, inconsistent with the convention. The present article's findings suggest that children's access to rights is regulated by more or less hidden values that are based on moral ideas on empowerment and responsibilization, which in turn stem from the poor laws of post-reformation Europe. Values that have been internalized and administered in the welfare state have been enhanced in the neoliberal era. This calls for a responsibilization debate that is more sensitive to historical and cultural context, and to the existence of a multiplicity of responsibilities. This insight adds nuance to the usual explanatory model that tends to foreground the implementation of neoliberal mechanisms and a retrenchment of the welfare state. In the case of coercive care, we must look for an explanation within what we might call the internal moral logic of the Swedish welfare state that ties the fate of the child closely to the fate of the nation (c.f., Barker, 2018). In this sense, it is a national project. Moreover, this project is even more complex than what is suggested by Barker and Smith (2021). It is a national project driven by an interest to safeguard the interests of current and future society, which must be seen as two-fold exclusionary. On the one hand it is exclusionary towards outsiders – as is shown by Barker (2018) and others. On the other hand, which this study shows, it is also exclusionary within its inclusionary mechanisms, as children within the welfare system are responsibilized for their behaviour. Thereby, rights are reconceptualized in terms of security and control, motivated by the best interest of the society. However, neoliberal practices are not absent in this process. Interestingly, Berggren and Trägårdh (2006) has suggested that the Swedish state individualism, with its inherent tension between liberal claims on autonomy and socialist claims on collectivism, fits neatly with the neoliberalization of society. While I would not go as far as arguing that this study supports this claim, it does show how the internal logic of the welfare state and neoliberal rationalities at times are working in tandem rather than against each other. This relationship is evident when it comes to rights categorized as participation where opportunities to self-regulation are underlined. Those neoliberal rationalities are less visible regarding protection and provision indicates that we must see neoliberalization as one of the several aspects, rather than a distinct phenomenon, that contributes to the responsibilization of these children (c.f., Brenner et al., 2010).

In the first issue of this journal, O’Donnell and O'Sullivan (2020) pointed out the importance of zooming out on traditional penal practices and instead directing our attention to alternative forms of control. Following this call, this study has unveiled a story of how individual rights and the implementation of international conventions are recontextualized to fit a national agenda – that of the Swedish welfare state. This means that we cannot seek answers in ideas of the so-called universalistic welfare state, which the current responsibilization debate tend to do, if we strive to achieve an evolution of the rights of children in these settings. Nor can we simply translate ‘more rights’ into current structures. Instead, we must go beyond simplistic claims that children's rights are either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and adopt a critical approach to the translation process that targets structural concerns. Furthermore, acknowledging the practice of coercive care as a form of coercive confinement and an inclusionary welfare state mechanism with old historical roots in the poor laws of post-reformation Europe contributes an important problematization of the internal (moral) logic of the Swedish welfare state, and by extension, the Nordic context.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Johan Edman, Magnus Hörnqvist and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Jonna Rennerskog

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