This study explores the portrayal of girls engaged in violence within Swedish newspapers, focusing on contemporary representations in the media landscape. News media plays a pivotal role in shaping societal perceptions and norms, including those surrounding violence and gender. Analyzing media depictions of girls’ violence is crucial as it influences our understanding of gender norms and violence. We examined newspaper articles from 2021 to discern how violent girls were depicted, the portrayal of their actions, and whether they were given agency in the narratives. Utilizing gender theory with an intersectional lens, we scrutinized how Swedish media reported on and portrayed girls’ violence. Three key themes emerged: the characteristics of violent girls, the forms of violence, and explanations for their behavior. Notably, explanations for girls’ violence often focused narrowly on individual or relational factors, neglecting broader social contexts. Additionally, the girls were rarely given a platform to express their perspectives. Media portrayals positioned them as deviant from both feminine and violent norms, reinforcing societal stereotypes.

In most Western societies, there are metropolitan neighbourhoods defined as deprived. In the public eye, not least through media reports, descriptions of these areas often revolve around violence and crime, creating a common understanding of these areas as violent and dangerous places, consequently inhabited by violent and dangerous people. At the same time, these are also neighbourhoods where people carry on their everyday lives, a perspective seldom highlighted. Further, this one-sided depiction of deprived areas tends to put boys and young men in focus, excluding girls and young women. In this chapter, we set out to map and discuss research on the meaning of place in the lives of girls in deprived areas. In doing so, we hope to contribute to a more complex and nuanced understanding of what it is like for girls growing up in deprived neighbourhoods today.

This article aims to explore lived experiences of the asylum process in Sweden from the perspectives of unaccompanied young people and social workers who work with these young people during a period when Swedish asylum-laws went through a transformation. Young people are expected to become ‘integrated’ and create a sense of belonging in Sweden within a temporary perspective, and the social workers are supposed to work towards integration during more prolonged waiting times and more restrictive asylum politics. The article is based on interviews with young people with current or recent experience of the asylum process and social workers in a non-governmental organization. The results are centred around three themes: (1) the deportable young person; (2) time and waiting; (3) the contagious deportability and state of waiting. These are related to the asylum process from both the young people’s perspectives and how the social workers experience and talk about the young people’s situations. The findings show that the asylum-law changes have created an imminent threat of becoming deported, which puts young people in a state of deportability. There are demands to both wait and ‘integrate’ during this time, which is understood as a paradox of waiting. The deportability is also contagious, affecting the social workers who are supposed to provide support with integration in the middle of the precarious time the state of deportability and waiting creates.

This article aims to explore the impact of neoliberal logic and ideas of establishment in Sweden on non-governmental social work with asylum-seeking young people. The focus is on the perceptions of the social workers within a non-governmental organisation (NGO) working with the establishment of unaccompanied young people. Data were collected through interviews and participant observations and analysed using theories of neoliberalism, belonging and neoliberal racism. The results show that when the migration laws were toughened in Sweden, the social workers and the NGO had to adapt. The NGO repackaged their target group only to include young people with residency, excluding others. The social workers resisted these changes and went beyond their formal duties to support all young people regardless of asylum status. However, the social work provided was still within the establishment framework of the programme. They kept working towards establishing people already deemed within a neoliberal and colonial logic as unestablishable.

The aim of this article is to examine how establishment in Swedish society is interpreted and what values are considered important from the perspective of a non-governmental organisation mentoring programme, and how the non-governmental organisation’s work towards establishment among ‘unaccompanied’ young people is carried out. The results are based on analysis of the non-governmental organisation’s policy documents, conversations and semi-structured interviews with the employed mentors. Bridget Anderson’s concept of a ‘community of value’ is used to critically analyse the data. The results show how the mentoring programme supports establishment, as well as the importance of mobility within the city and of building networks and knowledge about everyday life in Swedish society, all of which highlight certain values as more important than others for establishment in Sweden. The mentoring work is intended to overcome boundaries but risks reproducing boundaries whereby the young people need to create a belonging based on an idealised notion of ‘Swedishness’.

Belonging is a contested concept, and for young people arriving unaccompanied by parents to seek asylum in Sweden, belonging is conditional. The aim of this thesis is thus to analyse belonging in the context of an NGO mentoring programme for young people defined as unaccompanied in Sweden. By intersecting different dimensions of belonging, this is studied both from the young people’s own perspective and within the work of the mentoring programme. The thesis builds on interviews, participant observations, and policy documents gathered from the NGO mentoring programme, which more specifically works with ‘unaccompanied’ young people placed in kinship care in a Swedish suburban neighbourhood to support their establishment in Sweden. Participating in the study are young people involved in the programme and the employed mentors. The results show that the young people create a sense of belonging through transnational and local migrant networks, while the NGO perceives the young people’s situations in kinship care and in the Swedish suburban neighbourhood as limited. The mentoring programme’s work to promote establishment is intended to help the young people to overcome possible boundaries, and to reach a belonging to Swedish society. As such, the work can be interpreted as a form of boundary work. However, this work risks producing new boundaries – those between a desired, but imagined, ‘Swedish community of value’, and the migrant ‘other’. Hierarchies of belonging are thus created, within which the young people must strive to become ‘good Swedes’ to be seen as established in society. The thesis also shows how these boundaries can be challenged within social work by acting against racial structures and imagined collective communities. It thus argues for the importance of acknowledging and actively working with young people’s transnational and local networks to avoid the reproduction of boundaries.