A popular contemporary narrative asserts that Sweden has become “the society of easily offended victims” (Eberhard, 2009; see also Berensten, 2014; Dahlstrand, 2012; Heberlein, 2005; Zaremba, 2008). Official statistics show how defamation of character claims have increased dramatically over time (The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention, 2018). Such observations relates to developments in the school system where the number of complaints regarding degrading treatment (DT) have also increased (The Swedish Schools Inspectorate, 2018). Overall, schools’ work against DT is framed by increasing awareness of the role of formal obligations, trials, evidence, damages, individual rights and childrens’ subjective experiences of being offended. Plans, preventions, expanding forms of investigations and documentation are enacted in order to provide guarantees that DT do not occur; that is, that students are not exposed to any behaviour that violates their “dignity” (The Swedish Education Act SFS 2010:800, §6).
The increasing legal framing when it comes to schools’ work with problems of DT has been discussed in terms of juridification (Lindgren, Carlbaum, Hult & Segerholm, in press). The overall aim of this study is to explore how new judicial forms of work against DT in Swedish schools affect young people’s socialisation and identity. In a previous study, based on interviews with students, we could not confirm any radically new patterns of socialisation (Lindgren, Hult, Carlbaum & Segerholm, 2018). The present study then, is an attempt to validate these results by including the perspective of experienced school actors who have a different overview and relation to the issues at hand. We thus analyse interviews with both school actors and students from grade five and grade eight when reasoning about problems of DT and how such problems are understood and acted on in schools.
Our theoretical framework establishes a direct link between juridification and socialisation through Habermas’ ideas on the colonisation of the lifeworld by the instrumental rationality of bureaucracies and market-forces (Habermas, 1987). Juridification thus describe how intuitive forms of everyday communication, norms and values becomes reified by legal logic (Habermas, 1987). Drawing on these ideas Honneth (2014) has offered examples of social pathologies that significantly impairs the ability to take part in important forms of social cooperation.
We interviewed students, teachers, head teachers, school staff and responsible officials at the municipality level at five schools in two municipalities. Both students and school staff talk about the juridified significance of DT, that it is decided by the offended person, but have ambiguous ideas ofthe juridified way that the school handle incidents. Both school staff and students claim that the word DT (kränkning) mostly is used by students jokingly, e.g. when reprimanded. Students hesitate in informing teachers of incidents because it sets in motion disproportionate investigations, e.g. informing parents. Thus, students want the teachers to see and know of incidents, but not necessarily to act upon them according to formal standards. Overall, such preliminary results indicate that increasing regulation in school may cultivate juridified selves by stressing subjective feelings and formal investigations while muting dialogue.
2019. s. 826-827
NERA 2019 – Education in a Globalized World, 6–8 March 2019, Uppsala, Sweden