Dangerous youngsters or youngsters (not) in danger? Constructions of unaccompanied children by Swedish service providers

ABSTRACT

This article discusses how a selection of service providers talk about unaccompanied minors as a specific group of children and how these constructions relate to the way in which the service providers articulate what they see as their prime work and obligations amid these children and youth. The interview data were collected as part of two separate follow-up studies conducted in two different parts of Sweden, where the municipal reception of unaccompanied minors was explored. The analysis points to how three rather different and opposing, yet overlapping, narratives were brought to the fore by the service providers. The unaccompanied minors could be framed as unproblematic youngsters (not in danger), problematic youngsters (possibly dangerous), or examples of any other child in a specific problematic situation (in danger). These constructions influenced what aid or intervention was deemed legitimate. The findings have important policy implications because they point to the need to address and reflect on the underlying categorizations that social workers and service providers maintain and reproduce when they talk about specific client groups, such as unaccompanied children and young people, as these categorizations may come to have real consequences and implications for the unaccompanied children affected by these constructions.

KEYWORDS:

• Unaccompanied minors
• service providers
• discourse
• social constructions
• interventions

Unaccompanied minors IN sweden

In Sweden, municipalities are responsible for the care and wellbeing of unaccompanied minors from their first arrival, through their asylum process, and—if the minor is granted residence in Sweden—until they reach the age of 18 years (or 21 if they attend school).¹ This means that unaccompanied minors have more extended rights during the asylum process than adult and/or accompanied child asylum seekers do.² The singling out of unaccompanied minors as subjects with exclusive rights is in line with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which clarifies the specific obligations that states have regarding the wellbeing of refugee children and youths separated from their close family members and kin (such children are categorised as unaccompanied children in Sweden).

During the years following 2006, working with unaccompanied minors has become part of the tasks of Swedish social workers, whether these minors are placed in institutional care (hem för vård eller boende, HVB) or in a foster home (familjehem). The local reception of unaccompanied children and youngsters is clearly not limited to the work of social workers; rather, it involves a variety of other actors working within the broad field of social pedagogics who are all actively participating in the construction of everyday life surrounding the unaccompanied minors. In addition to social workers, custodians, foster parents, residential home staff, teachers, healthcare practitioners, become important people involved in the reception of unaccompanied minors in Sweden.

In scholarly discourse (both in the Nordic and Anglo-Saxon countries), it is emphasised that despite their heterogeneity, unaccompanied children often risk being depicted as rather one-dimensional by social workers and teachers (Kohli 2007; Bunar 2010; Wernesjö 2014; Herz & Lalander, 2017). Unaccompanied minors are ‘othered,’ their perceived shortcomings are often taken for granted (not least in school), and they are positioned as vulnerable and different from other children. In a study conducted by Herz and Lalander (2017), unaccompanied minors narrated experiences of being stereotypically categorised by the staff in their residential care homes; the youngsters considered this treatment provocative, but at the same time, hard for them to question because the negative positioning of the unaccompanied minors had been institutionalised. This ‘othering’ also corresponds to what Engebrigtsen (2012) argues is a view of unaccompanied minors as subjects positioned outside of childhood and ‘out of place,’ as some of the children and youngsters’ possible experiences—for example, being separated from family at an early age, working instead of playing or going to school, surviving traumatic ordeals—are considered as opposing the notion of children and healthy or normal childhoods implicitly held by many service providers (cf. Korp and Stretmo 2020).

The one-sided focus on emotional problems and vulnerability among unaccompanied minors risks rendering invisible the structural conditions—asylum regulations, strict policies, racism, exclusion, and so on—youngsters experience (Shina 2008; Wernesjö, 2019; Edlins & Larisson, 2020), as well as the resources and capabilities of unaccompanied minors (Watters 2008). Although previous experiences of unaccompanied minors and the position of being minor asylum seekers risk endangering their wellbeing, the studies mentioned above emphasise the importance of not constructing these children as merely a specific group of victims, or as is sometimes also the case, as children in the hands of calculating parents or as potentially strategic migrants—perhaps even secretly adult ones (cf. Stretmo, 2014; McLaughlin 2018). According to Malkki (1995), the construction of refugees as either victims (e.g. vulnerable children) or threats (e.g. ‘irregular’ migrants) corresponds to the refugee-reception system as either caring or controlling (cf. Eastmond and Ascher 2011). Hence, constructions of the social world exhibit perceptions that have real implications (cf. Lipsky 1969; Schneider and Ingram 1993; Cárdenas and Ramirez de la Cruz 2017; Edlins & Larisson, 2020; Vitus and Jarlby 2021).

The overall aim of this article is to analyze how a selection of actors broadly labeled as ‘service providers’ – i.e. social workers, custodians, foster parents, residential home staff, teachers, healthcare practitioners– construct unaccompanied minors, and further, to critically deconstruct the actions that these constructions make legitimate. On the one hand, ‘constructions’ render our social world possible, but on the other, they tend to obstruct or exclude other possible understandings and interventions (Foucault 1977; Schneider and Ingram 1993; Gubrium and Järvinen 2014; Loseke 2017). Questions guiding the article are as follows: How and in what ways are unaccompanied minors positioned as specific subjects by the service providers? What actions and interventions are these conceptualizations legitimising?

The discussion focuses on the implications of three constructions of unaccompanied minors as not in danger, possibly dangerous, or in danger—that is, unproblematic, problematic, or in a problematic situation. These constructions are also related to unaccompanied minors being positioned as either different from other groups of children, and hence, as ‘exceptions’ or possibly ‘dangerous’ and to be controlled or monitored, or as any other child in a special situation, meaning that they are ‘in danger,’ and hence, entitled to the same reception and wellbeing as any other Swedish child or youngster. Of course, these constructions are not totally differentiated from each other; they are overlapping and depict unaccompanied minors as rather ambivalent subjects. Yet, constructing unaccompanied minors as a specific ‘something’ has clearly had an impact on how these service providers have come to articulate their work with these children: For instance, constructing unaccompanied minors as somehow essentially different from those either implicit or explicitly marked out as ‘Swedish’ children has been related to the service providers’ legitimising that they work differently with them. It has also been connected to the positioning or othering of unaccompanied minors compared with Swedish children. The construction of unaccompanied minors as a case of ‘any other child,’ as argued below, could instead be used to legitimize that special or even affirmative action should or could be taken in their regard.

Constructing meaning in talk

To grasp some of the themes highlighted by the service providers, a discourse concept inspired by the work of the French scholar Michel Foucault is adopted. According to his definition, discourses refer not only to what is said in different contexts but also to underlying processes that render the spoken word possible (Foucault, 1982). Hence, a discourse in the Foucauldian perception is related to the power to define and categorise the social world by constructing what is to be considered ‘normality’ and what is considered ‘truthful’ and ‘good’ amid the ‘false’ and ‘bad’ in historical and contextual senses (Foucault, 1977, 1982; Chambon et al., 1999; Gubrium & Järvinen, 2014). Hence, a discourse such as the one concerning unaccompanied minors is not a fixed and static description of the social world; instead, tensions, contradictions, and conflicts, such as opposing concepts (dichotomies), different narratives, and ambivalences (Thörn, 1997), tend to operate within it, causing the discourse to be rather fluid and unfixed.

Different speech about the social world, such as the distinctions between veracity and falseness or between subjects positioned as trustworthy versus fraudulent, are made visible—or are constructed—when, for example, social workers conduct social investigations to decide whether a subject warrants a specific intervention. These processes point to the importance of analyzing how different social phenomena become framed as specific social problems because they tend to favour certain actions and solutions above others. Hence, constructions of the social world are not merely manners of speaking but perceptions that are real in their consequences and implications (cf. Schneider & Ingram, 1993; Loseke, 2017).³ The construction of refugees and the consequent practice of refugee care are parallel and mirroring processes. If refugees are constructed as subjects sharing a unique trauma, the refugee-reception system tends to focus on care-related practice. In contrast, if the refugee subject is seen or constructed as a possible obstruction or a threat to a ‘natural system’ of borders and states, the refugee-reception system comes to emphasise more control and sanctioning of its subject, the refugee (Malkki, 1995; Vitus & Jarlby, 2021).

Methods and material

This article takes its point of departure from two extensive studies focusing on the reception of unaccompanied minors in the municipal context of Sweden. However, this analysis draws on a selection of the (group and single) interviews conducted with service providers as part of these studies. In this article, ‘service providers’ are defined as professionals aiming to cater to the needs of unaccompanied minors in different arenas of the municipal reception system.

The first study and interview set were conducted in a selection of three municipalities situated in the region of West Sweden (Västra Götaland), and the second study was carried out in a municipality in the region of Stockholm. Both studies were conducted as so-called follow-up studies aiming to improve the municipal reception of unaccompanied minors. The West Sweden study was partly funded by the European Refugee Fund and the second by the municipality in focus.

The interviews were semi-structured, focusing on the interviewees’ experiences of working with unaccompanied minors and how they perceived their role in the reception of them. Various people active in the municipal reception of unaccompanied minors were interviewed in both interview sets: One-on-one and group interviews with residential care staff were carried out (some working in privately run houses, yet most in municipal-driven HVB homes); custodians, foster parents, social service officers, teachers from introductory programmes in secondary and upper secondary schools, school healthcare teams, and other healthcare workers participated.⁴ All interviews took place at the professionals’ workplaces and were audio recorded. The interviews lasted for about an hour each, and they were all transcribed verbatim. The names of the places and the participating service providers have been anonymized. Both studies followed the Swedish Research Council’s ethical guidelines concerning information, consent, and confidentiality (Swedish Research Council, 2017).

The transcripts of interviews have been analyzed with a focus on highlighting central themes—constructions, conceptualizations, and contradictions within the concepts that surfaced from the data (Kvale, 2007). Inspired by a concept of discourse adopted from the Foucauldian tradition combined with a more intersectional framework, it has been central to this analysis to understand how talk frames meaning and legitimises interventions—and hence, how it becomes possibly real in its implications. Though the Foucauldian analysis focuses on discursive order and conceptualizations that construct a specific discourse and vice versa, a Focauldian perspective can fruitfully be combined with a focus that also aims to highlight the conceptual polarities that often coexist within a discourse (Cf. Thörn 1997; author).

Intersectionality can be defined as the study of how complex and intertwined categories and structures of power work and operate on and between subjects. Regarding the study conducted here, gender, age and ethnicity/race came to operate between and through one another, which meant that they were dependent yet also inter-dependent categories that gave different meanings when they intersected (Cf. Mattson, 2010; Hammarén 2008 and Elmeroth 2012).

Although the talk was engaged in by service providers who represented different arenas and organisational logics, and the interviewees had distinct roles in the reception of unaccompanied minors, similar frames and articulations/problematizations were depicted in the process of analysis. This points to how common frames of social knowledge tend to limit possible perceptions of a given phenomenon and the interpretative frameworks available.

In the next sections of the article, the analysis of the empirical material is highlighted. First, this is done by illustrating how the service providers construct the unaccompanied minors—that is, how they assign them meaning through their talk. This is followed by discussing what practices these constructions come to legitimize. Finally, a concluding discussion is provided.

Positioning unaccompanied minors

When asked to give an overall view of what working with unaccompanied minors implies, the service providers interviewed often made implicit or explicit reference to other groups or categories of children. Unaccompanied minors were sometimes discussed in relation to other children with migrant backgrounds and at other times in relation to children with Swedish backgrounds. Among the service providers, the social workers, for instance, made such comparisons by contrasting unaccompanied minors to other groups of children in social care.

Unproblematic youngsters not in danger

Occasionally, unaccompanied minors were articulated as rather positive exceptions to what were then framed as ‘problem groups.’ Social workers tended to highlight the investigation of their cases and the follow-up on unaccompanied children and youths as much more straightforward compared with the management of other categories of children and young people. According to Johansson and Johansson (2012), children in social care in general are often positioned by the social service as ‘problematic youth,’ originating from what are categorised as ‘problem families.’ When constructed as different from this problematic youth, the unaccompanied minor is instead envisioned as a more manageable young person, neither in danger nor dangerous:

STEFAN (social worker): The statistics are absolutely amazing: I’ve had only one youth who has had serious criminal (…) and no diagnosed abusers. And I’m speaking about some hundreds of young people and everyone who has arrived … (From) the end of 2008 up to the present day, only one has been sentenced, and not one single drug abuser.

HELENA (social worker): So, this is a golden resource, given the (need) Europe has for labor.

STEFAN: Five years, I realize now, five years of receiving youngsters, (only) one criminal, (and) no substance abusers. (Group interview with social workers)

In the interview extract above, unaccompanied minors seem to be indirectly matched to groups of children and young people in social care. In comparison, unaccompanied minors are constructed as adaptable and non-problematic. They are even accentuated as possible economic assets in a Europe suffering from an impending labour shortage. By referring to statistics, the social worker Stefan also makes a strong case for generalizability, implying that law-abiding behaviour (i.e. not getting involved with criminality or drugs) is rather typical of unaccompanied minors. However, in how Stefan phrases his claim—or the way in which he talks—he concurrently suggests that becoming a substance abuser or committing crimes could otherwise be what he implicitly expects from a young person in a similar situation (or perhaps why the social service has come in contact with these young people in the first place). Hence, unaccompanied minors are constructed as good and respectable exceptions to what is otherwise depicted as a rather problematic category (youth in care. cf. Johansson & Johansson, 2012; Stretmo, 2014: 156).

Another reading of the quotation above might imply that the social workers have all been expecting some hardship or problematic behaviour from the group of unaccompanied minors. Thus, Helena’s accentuation of unaccompanied minors as a golden resource is interesting, considering the problematizations of unaccompanied minors often emphasised in contemporary public and official narrations, where they are continuously highlighted as problematic, at-risk children (Stretmo et al., 2010; Stretmo, 2014).

At other times, the unaccompanied minors are highlighted as survivors of harsh circumstances, resourceful or determined children who, because of their inner drive or self-motivation, have successfully made their journey halfway across the globe. In this narration, being determined comes to imply taking control over one’s situation and/or having used migration as a means for personal fulfillment and/or achieving success against rather tough odds. Also evident in the interviews is how structural factors tend to be rendered invisible when the achievements of determined youngsters are singled out as wonderful exceptions, but at the same time, as individual achievements (cf. Stretmo, 2014: 156–159). These seemingly positive images are often contrasted with other framings that focus on unaccompanied minors as either traumatised and problematic youngsters or youngsters with specific shortcomings and/or in a problematic situation.

Problematic youngsters (possibly dangerous)

In the interviews, service providers sometimes talked about what they found challenging regarding their work with unaccompanied minors. One such feature that they then often underlined was psychological risk, as well as the risk of (physical) distress and illness because the unaccompanied minor was living in uncertainty:

EMMA (upper secondary schoolteacher): All the newly arrived (pupils) come to our group, (and) as I said, there are many (unaccompanied minors) who are completely traumatized, some have already had a turn in a correctional institution (kriminalvården) and so on. So right now, we have a better situation than ever before. We have never had more than half of the class with a residence permit, so it’s been turbulent years. (Group interview with upper secondary schoolteachers)

The teacher Emma articulates being in an asylum process and the risk of rejection as specific situational factors (‘turbulent years’) that threaten the wellbeing of newly arrived youngsters. Concurrently, those she talks about are also singled out as possible risks, menaces, or ‘completely traumatised.’ Hence, unaccompanied minors are narrated as a group of fragile but also potentially aggressive and erratic individuals who are seemingly hard to predict and/or hard to work with:

PÄR (residential care staff): The children are in a crisis when they arrive. We must realize that. It’s horrible to watch and horrible to be around when it is like that. We had a boy who took matters into his own hands and ran. We have another who is in such a bad state medically that we can’t send him home. I feel powerless, I do. (Group interview with residential care staff)

Pär narrates a story similar to Emma’s. In his understanding, the crisis that the unaccompanied children are experiencing is connected to the uncertainty of living in an asylum process and the risk of having their asylum claim rejected and being deported to their country of origin, as well as to experiences prior to their arrival in Sweden, such as war, being separated from loved ones or the flight per se. The gravity of this situation is amplified by how one boy is said to be in such a ‘bad state medically that we can’t send him home,’ as well as in relation to how another youth is described as having decided to take ‘matters into his own hand and [run]’ away from care (i.e. disappear from official contact).

Living in uncertainty is often associated with illness and aggravated frailty. Hence, unaccompanied minors are constructed as the objects of an unpredictable asylum system. This period of lingering in uncertainty is thus conceptualised as a time and space when psychological distress results in physical symptoms (i.e. psychosomatics), as well as a period in which children and young people risk collapsing or displaying aggressive or self-destructive behaviour. This construction also singles out unaccompanied minors as ambivalent subjects that are hard to deal and work with. Inherent in the framing of unaccompanied minors as traumatised or as erratic is also the understanding of them as an unpredictable menace to stability and order; they are showcased as time bombs ready to detonate (cf. Stretmo, 2018; Stretmo & Melander, 2013).

Also apparent in the interviews conducted with service providers is how they intrinsically assign the unaccompanied children gendered and/or ethnic attributes. Hence, doing difference regarding unaccompanied minors is made legitimate because of the construction of them as a group different from ‘Swedish’ children and young people:

JASMIN (social worker): (I)t was how (the social service) reasoned from the very beginning. Yes, they’re supposed to be placed in a foster family, but there are few foster homes ready to receive these children. There is such a shortage of foster homes, and it’s not hard to understand why the Swedish family would not like to have a 17-year-old Afghan boy (living with them) who maybe just arrived in Sweden half a year ago, who doesn’t speak any Swedish, isn’t succeeding in school, doesn’t know Swedish codes, and so on. (Individual interview with social worker)

Jasmin, a social worker, constructs working with foster placements of unaccompanied minors as a rather tough option but also as something she narrates as somewhat understandable because of a specific intersection of gender, ethnicity/‘race,’ and age. Similar narrations were also expressed by other service providers:

NINA (school nurse): There are often language barriers, but I think we would have liked to talk a little more about sex and relationships, for example, or respect between boys and girls. Because I have thought about what it is like for these girls who go here, where there is a pretty macho atmosphere (…). It’s crowded, there’s a lot of guys, it smells like … testosterone (laughs) … (Group interview with upper secondary teachers and school healthcare team)

Nina narrates the importance of teaching newly arrived minors how to behave around women (or the few girls present in the introductory class), constructing them as intrinsically heterosexual (macho, smelling of testosterone) young men. The unaccompanied subject is accentuated as a young man (not a child) with poor Swedish-speaking skills and a lack of what Jasmin and Nina both construct as Swedish cultural knowledge or cultural codes. When talking about unaccompanied minors, the service providers are often even prone to use the male prefix he rather than she (evident in Pärs’s earlier quotation). In talk by service providers, the specific intersection of age, gender, and ethnicity works to construct the unaccompanied minor as either a problematic masculinity of Afghan or Muslim origin or as a possibly suppressed yet ambivalent feminine (cf. Hammarén, 2008). These distinctions are also interesting to highlight with reference to what such scholars as Fassin (2005), Watters (2007), and Wernesjö (2019) argue constitutes a moral economy operating to single out the deserved from the undeserved receivers of specific actions and aid. The problematizations further point to what Löfstrand (2005), Mattson (2010), and Herz (2012) argue in relation to social work as a gender and ethnic stratifying apparatus, as women and men and Swedes and non-Swedes are conceived differently in ways that are used to legitimize different interventions. Hence, unaccompanied girls and boys risk becoming the targets of distinct practices.

Youngsters in problematic situations (in danger)

In the interviews, the representation of possibly dangerous youngsters (problematic youngsters) sometimes corresponded to depictions of youngsters in danger (in a problematic situation). Articulations that were emphasised when service providers talked about their work with unaccompanied minors were the construction of them as children or young persons with specific inadequacies, calling for compensatory strategies among them. In school, such shortcomings could be narrated as what teachers, for instance, articulate as the children’s lack of previous education. While preparatory students (students in introductory classes) in general are framed as rather heterogeneous when it comes to the question of educational backgrounds (cf. Bunar, 2010, for similar findings), much of the teachers’ and pedagogues’ work involves distinguishing unaccompanied minors’ different levels of former education and placing them in the proper educational stream:

MARGARETA (teacher): (T)hose who have had good schooling know how to go to school and have the study skills, know how to do their homework, and (have) the appropriate learning skills. It goes quickly for them; they are enrolled (length of stay in the introductory school unit) between six months to a year, then they go another year, and get the grades they need. Some can even enroll in a national program after only two years. They are just a few in this situation, and among the unaccompanied, these (successful introductory students) are nearly non-existent, I would say. (Group interview with preparatory upper secondary school teachers)

According to Margareta, the heterogeneity of the preparatory students offers them distinctive preparation to benefit from the instructions and pedagogics given in the introductory classrooms. To ‘have the study skills’ is a principle that Margareta sees as beneficial in moving quickly from the preparatory class into a national school programme. Meanwhile, according to her rationale, among the group of unaccompanied minors, very few or even none have the learning skills or learning preparations needed. Inherent in Margareta’s story is also the view that unaccompanied minors’ risk being stuck in the transit space of the introductory classes for an extensive period of time. Margareta emphasises learning skills and appropriate schooling as if they were abilities of a general or objective character (simply phrasing it as ‘good schooling’). One could argue that the qualities she associates with good schooling ideally correspond to a Swedish/Western school system in general or a Swedish curriculum specifically. Good schooling as such does not constitute a universal knowledge base (cf. Burman, 2008; Elmeroth, 2012). Still, it is the introductory students’ lack of such specific knowledge versus their ability to quickly move (or not) through the Swedish school system that she highlights.

In this frame, unaccompanied children were often categorised as having educational shortcomings—with regard to what were then constructed as poor educational backgrounds or a struggle to achieve in school, making reference to possible futures or what were often constructed as rather bad labour-market prospects. According to Bunar (2010) and Torpsten (2012), teachers often express concern about what they perceive as an overall group of disadvantaged students with limited resources to acquire the proper language skills or the expected learning goals. The teachers sometimes framed the children and youngsters’ struggle by pointing out structural factors working to their disadvantage—global inequalities or poor schooling and/or poverty and/or the children’s’ risk of discrimination in Sweden. Evident in these constructions is also the tendency to homogenise unaccompanied children and young people and assign them a highly problem-oriented positioning (cf. de los Reyes & Kamali, 2005; Lundberg, 2015).

Other service providers narrate their understanding of unaccompanied minors as vulnerable because of specific situational factors, as well as relative to what is constructed as a certain developmental period that they undergo as ‘normal teenagers’ (adolescence as a specific time and space). Emphasising how unaccompanied children constitute children or youngsters like any others is central:

BENGT (pediatrician): [Y]ou have to see these children as normal, healthy teenagers with a lot of resources, but they have also been exposed to many extreme strains, and they suffer from poor psychological health because of it. … To be able to keep this balance between seeing that these young people are in normal development and that they have these special needs … that’s what you try to teach something about. (Group interview with healthcare practitioners)

Evident in Bengt’s narration above is how unaccompanied minors are understood as any other children in a specific developmental phase; their behaviour and state of mind can also be understood as related to the specifics of simply being adolescents. Aggressive behaviour, which was constructed as signaling that the youngsters were in a terrible state of mind (see, e.g. the quotations above from the teacher Emma and the social educator Pär), could consequently also be re-articulated as examples of teenagers in a so-called process of liberation and hence be conceptualised quite differently. This framing tends to stress the possible similarities operating between children regardless of their ethnic belonging, class, and gender and stresses the specific strain unaccompanied children experience because of their positioning as underage migrants and/or asylum seekers, without parental support, and the specific needs they might have (see, e.g. the children’s rights discourse working to establish the rights of unaccompanied minors in the British context; McLaughlin, 2018).

Legitimised interventions

As stated earlier, constructions of the social world are linked to ideas of how best to address a specific issue. Whether unaccompanied minors are constructed as unproblematic positive exceptions, problematic, or like any other children or youths in a problematic situation, they are often singled out as subjects requiring specific training and/or knowledge to succeed in school or in Swedish society. When they were ‘othered’ or placed in a rather disadvantaged position, calls were often made for novel strategies amid this group. Here, to do or act differently means that more regular routines or ways of operating are somewhat set aside. The empirical material indicates that this doing of difference tends to involve legitimising that the regular or ordinary schemes or schedules are sidestepped and that other types of interventions are chosen for the unaccompanied minors instead. This leads us to the question of what kinds of actions and work service providers deem necessary and what implications these views can have for their daily work.

Reproducing deficiencies in uncertain times

A strategy that many teachers highlighted was often narrated as the necessity to make unaccompanied children and youngsters view their academic prospects more realistically by working to diminish their expectations.

EMMA (teacher): So we work to diminish their (unaccompanied minors’) expectations … but some students … those who have moved on from here, they are so eager to work and work and work, so the students who are downstairs attending what we call the introduction program, in its individual alternative (individuellt introduktionsprogram), they study like crazy. In order to enroll in upper secondary education this year, (the authorities) want (the newly arrived students) to pass at least eight subjects now, and then (teachers) have a great challenge telling (students) that they might need to stay here two more years in order to make it. That’s really hard (for the students) to understand. (Group interview with teachers from an upper secondary school, introductory unit)

Lundqvist (2010) emphasises that although children with migrant backgrounds are often found to be more highly school motivated compared with their Swedish-born peers, they still tend to be underrepresented in postsecondary education. One might question whether the strategy of lowering students’ expectations (that Emma emphasises in the excerpt above) is to some extent, incommensurable with making the same students stay motivated. Although the service providers often construct unaccompanied minors’ lack of previous schooling as having been caused by structural factors, they also sometimes come to frame them as subjects who are less likely to think critically or harbour any real academic interests (Stretmo, 2014). One could argue that the teachers and other service providers risk constructing unaccompanied students as ‘guilty by association,’ as well as essentially different from other students (Runfors, 2003). This may result in the homogenisation of a rather heterogeneous group of students. Newly arrived students, including unaccompanied minors, are often seen as flawed or inadequate compared with the norm, which is inherently measured by what is highlighted as the normalised ‘Swedish’ students (see, e.g. Gruber, 2007; Bunar, 2010).

What emerges from the interviews is that the asylum process per se is constructed as a kind of lottery into which neither the unaccompanied minors nor those working with them have any real influence or insight (cf. Stretmo & Melander, 2013). The outcome is not possible to predict, and unaccompanied children and those who work with them are forced to respond to what often comes to be narrated as highly unequal conditions: The children and adolescents who have received their final approval or rejection and unaccompanied minors who are still awaiting their asylum decisions cohabit the same classrooms and residential homes. These uneven conditions are often constructed as causing potential turmoil, which is sometimes narrated as potentially undermining the stability of the residential home or the situation in the classroom (Stretmo, 2014). Therefore, living in uncertainty corresponds to narrating experiences of working with uncertainty articulated by teachers, social workers, custodians, healthcare practitioners, foster parents, and residential home staff: Working with uncertainty or children who risk collapsing comes to oppose the understanding of unaccompanied children as ‘easy-to-handle children.’

Avoidance strategies

Some of the social workers interviewed connected working with uncertainty to the requirement that they adopt novel measures.

KARL (social worker): Many have been in a very bad state, which of course pretty much comes to affect what all the work around them looks like … I feel that it has been rather difficult perhaps to conduct an investigation in that systematic—and well, what can I say—structured fashion you usually have the objective to do. You might dig into their backgrounds, what kind of background the children or youngsters carries with them, and so on. But certain bits and pieces have often felt too difficult or perhaps even irrelevant to talk about in that situation. Sometimes, it has all been very focused on the current emotional state and kind of how ‘I’m feeling today,’ and so on. (One-on-one interview)

According to Karl, it is sometimes a challenge to conduct the psychosocial work that is required of him when unaccompanied minors are in such a bad mental state. In Karl’s quotation, these specific circumstances seem to justify that some standard operating schemes are put aside, focusing on the here and now instead of more systematic and structured social work, such as mapping to the children’s pasts following the Looking After Children assessment approach (Barnens behov i centrum). Yet, Karl also expresses some uncertainty regarding his strategy. His ambivalence might point to something also expressed by other social workers. On the one hand, social workers tend to legitimize a focus on the here and now because this strategy is seen to avoid putting fragile children and youth under more strain until their living conditions are stable. Yet, as many unaccompanied minors tend to live in prolonged uncertainty and sometimes in protracted asylum processes, unaccompanied minors risk never receiving thorough investigations and follow-ups (cf. Stretmo, 2018).

In the interviews, there are many examples of how mental illness among the unaccompanied minors is constructed as legitimising avoidant approaches or strategies. Asking too many questions is occasionally constructed as a possible cause of more distress to unaccompanied minors, and hence, it is deemed to be an inappropriate method (cf. Kohli, 2006, 2007; Malmsten, 2014). Yet, such constructions may also work to protect those working with unaccompanied minors from ever being confronted with information or experiences that service providers might find tough and or even problematic to handle. According to Kohli (2006, 2007), avoidant practices are sometimes adopted by social workers, for instance, to circumvent possibly re-traumatizing unaccompanied children. This practice could also be analyzed as a strategy to protect the social workers from being confronted with or consequently also having to deal with sensitive information given by children and youths.

There is a tendency in the analyzed interviews that service providers narrate unaccompanied minors as being so affected by some of the situational factors they experience, such as living in uncertainty caused by the asylum process and/or being separated from parents, that these contextual factors are constructed as virtually constituting a part of that specific youngster’s very being (cf. Wernesjö, 2014; Engebrigtsen, 2002, 2012). When children and youngsters are categorised as ambivalent sufferers in a state of emergency, constructing specific or exclusive measures for them or doing difference when working with unaccompanied minors is deemed legitimate.

The unaccompanied minor: not really a child versus a case of any other child

As pointed out in the previous section, unaccompanied minors can be framed as positive exceptions from problem categories. In the findings, this construction was also connected to service providers talking about the need to do difference in practice. Sometimes this implied that service providers articulated a kind of (over-)confidence in the ability and strength of the individual unaccompanied minor. Yet, the positioning of the ‘survivor’ often comes to suggest being ‘more’ mature in comparison to Swedish-born children, making survivors possible mismatches for the Swedish childcare system:

MELINA (residential staff member): It may become a source of frustration because many (unaccompanied minors) may have taken care of their family in their home country, and then they come here and are treated like children. It can be really tough.

NAMIR (residential staff member): I was just thinking, but I didn’t say it, but it’s challenging too. We must not treat them as equal to a Swedish 17-year-old because they are different, but at the same time, you can be 15 and have been working for two years. It is difficult for almost everyone; society treats them like 15 years old or younger … maybe they are really 12 years and already worked in industry, and so they … have more experience in life. … The mom is expecting to get his weekly allowance from him, so it’s hard. (Group interview with residential home staff)

In the extract above, Melina and Namir (residential care staff) position unaccompanied minors as more mature than Swedish children of the same age because of having had what are articulated as different experiences. The unaccompanied minors are emphasised as having worked before coming to Sweden or having contributed economically to their families for years. In Namir and Melina’s construction, maturity is connected to specific activities and not necessarily to age. The unaccompanied minor is constructed as a breadwinner, making him different or older than the average Swedish 12- or 17-year-old. The images of unaccompanied minors as mature (precocious) can be analyzed as connected to more common Western ideas of childhood as a space associated with specific activities and disassociated from others. The discourse on children is inherently connected to narratives of playful activities or learning and schooling and dependency (cf. Jenks, 1996; Engebrigtsen, 2002, 2012). In Namir’s quotation, the unaccompanied minor is distinguished from the Swedish teenager by having experienced a work trajectory and having been expected to contribute economically to the family. According to Melina, it is difficult for unaccompanied minors to be treated like Swedish children because of their perceived adult positioning. In other words, doing adult activities and being independent back home signify being positioned a bit outside of the concept of childhood in Sweden. This positioning clearly also comes to imply the need for residential home staff to work differently with the unaccompanied minors compared with Swedish children/youth of the same age, perhaps undermining the sufficient care and support needed.

Doing difference, whether it comes to imply talking about the need to work toward lowering the academic aspirations of the unaccompanied minors, to conduct more simplistic versions of social work, or to construct the unaccompanied minors as a mismatch for the Swedish childcare system, risks working in a rather negative fashion. Positioning unaccompanied minors as somewhat different, or othering them, tends to make calls for more controlling and disciplining measures seem justified, alongside strategies to compensate for the unaccompanied minors’ perceived academic, gendered, or cultural ‘otherness’ (cf. Stretmo 2014):

INGA-LILL (social worker): Because it’s so easy not to do it, we feel sorry for them and then say okay, it’s clear that you don’t need to go (to school) if you feel bad, or if you misplace or lose something, you get the item replaced, and stuff like that. And that breeds contempt for society. Now maybe I’m spinning off topic here but … but I see it as a challenge (to construct) a reception that … that also includes responsibility and requirements. (One-on-one interview)

When unaccompanied minors are articulated as ambivalent subjects, service providers frame their task as teaching unaccompanied minors to take a realistic look at their prospects, or as in Inga-Lill’s comment, make them respectable by displaying gratitude in return for what is given to them. According to Stretmo (2014), providers sometimes frame unaccompanied minors’ desires or aspirations as unrealistic. This points to how needs as such are always contextually constructed between the caregiver and the receiver of care, that is, the unaccompanied minor, but at the same time, it indicates that their different positions give the caregiver (positioned as adult, professional, Swedish, sometimes middle class) a clear interpretative privilege vis-à-vis the children and youngsters (positioned as children, migrants, sometimes Afghani or black and/or Somali and/or Muslim, boys, or girls).

In some cases, doing difference could also indicate that service providers are prone to make positive exceptions or somehow bend the rules to compensate for what, in these cases, are seen as structural factors working to the disfavour of unaccompanied minors:

HELENA (social worker): Actually, one could imagine that one should take greater responsibility for them. One could turn it all around and say that (since they) don’t have a network that can support them with secondhand furniture or someone who can slip them a little cash when it’s someone’s birthday, someone who isn’t getting anything from anyone. (Group interview with social workers)

According to Helena, the lack of parental or societal support places unaccompanied minors in an unfavourable position in society. By stressing structural factors, Helena constructs unaccompanied minors as a case of being ‘like any other child.’ According to the social worker Helena’s rationale, Swedish society should take specific action to counter the disadvantages of not having a social network or supportive family members. Quite contrary to the implication of ‘doing difference’ as doing less, in this view, unaccompanied children and youngsters should instead be the legitimate targets of extra economic resources and extended support to overcome their inferior positioning. Central to this conceptualisation is a construction of unaccompanied minors as vulnerable because they are minors and hence in need of (parental) care, nurturing, and support to be safe (cf. Jenks, 1996; Meyer, 2007).

When constructed as a case of just any other child, service providers come to underline what is then accentuated as the need for extended care and supportive measures, highlighting the similarities between children and youngsters, regardless of their origin. According to this problematization, the aspects of unaccompanied minors’ specific positioning and structural factors—being separated from their parents, claiming asylum on their own, and so on—should allow them to receive extra safety and comfort.

Concluding discussion

Service providers talk about unaccompanied minors as ‘positive exceptions’ from other minors categorised as suffering from social problems, but at the same time, they present unaccompanied minors as a group of problematic children and young people at risk of distress or as ‘youths with specific shortcomings’ in a problematic situation. These narratives construct the unaccompanied minor as an ambivalent subject who is seemingly hard to fit into existing social categories. This othering makes calls for novel actions vis-à-vis unaccompanied minors (in comparison to what is otherwise constructed as ‘normal procedures’) seem appropriate.

In other contexts, the unaccompanied minor is constructed as a ‘case like any other child,’ albeit in danger. By focusing on the situational factors of unaccompanied minors, this counterclaim directs attention to the necessity to ensure that unaccompanied minors receive relevant and extended care and support—and even to ‘bend the rules’ a little or to prioritise unaccompanied minors to make certain that they do receive the support they need. This construction emphasises the similar needs and rights children and youngsters have, regardless of gender, ethnic belonging, class, or disabilities.

Whether the unaccompanied minor is constructed as a case of any other child or is ‘othered’ as a mismatch for the system, doing difference is often emphasised as a legitimate strategy for the minor’s support. Moreover, ‘doing difference’ is often legitimised by how unaccompanied minors are seen as living in uncertainty (i.e. because of the asylum process, loss of parents, or parents living abroad). Thus, working with unaccompanied minors often implies that service providers are working with uncertainty. Doing difference could be analyzed as a strategy to overcome the possible ambivalence that working with uncertainty might imply.

The practice of doing difference can clearly have different implications: When unaccompanied minors are seen as ‘any other child,’ doing difference implies a kind of affirmative action, aiming to strengthen a disadvantaged group of children and youths. Yet, doing difference is more frequently narrated as the practice of in fact doing less. When unaccompanied minors are constructed as ‘different children’ in talk (i.e. as children with specific shortcomings, as traumatised children, etc.), this is often used to legitimize that the service providers are talking about how they avoid action that they would otherwise take or are even otherwise obligated to do. In the world of social work, this could come to imply not involving parents living abroad in the follow-up of a specific child, avoiding questions about the child’s or youth’s past, or even choosing not to initiate a thorough social service investigation until (when or if) the child or youth receives a permanent residence permit (Stretmo, 2014).

The findings have important policy implications for social work and for service providers working with refugee children and young people, illustrating how service providers’ constructions frame how they talk about the work they do with and for these children. As mentioned in the introduction, constructions are to be seen as perceptions of the social reality that make things, artifacts, and subjects visual and meaningful to us. However, these constructions are not merely how people come to talk about reality; constructions are different ways of seeing and understanding reality that come to imply specific actions or practices on par with our understanding of that reality. According to Cárdenas & Ramirez de la Cruz (2017) and Edlin & Larsson (2020) this illustrates how the administrative discretion exercised by street-level bureaucrats, may unintentionally result in what could be framed as ‘administrative evil’ or an outcome that risks diminishing social equity. Therefore, it is necessary to critically address how and when ideas concerning, for instance, gender, ethnicity, and age become blended in the understanding of a given social categorisation and the possible and real implications they can have in young people’s lives. In the case of how service providers talk about their work with unaccompanied minors in Sweden, their constructions clearly influence whether the providers come to legitimate doing less or when they justify making an extra effort to ensure that unaccompanied minors receive care and support to compensate for or overcome a rather disadvantaged position.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by European Refugee Fund.

Notes

1 The Swedish municipalities are also made responsible for rejected unaccompanied minors until they are either sent away/deported from Sweden to their country of origin or reach 18 years of age, at which point they are able to process a new asylum claim as an adult (Stretmo & Melander, 2013).

2 Just as with adult asylum seekers and asylum-seeking children accompanied by their parents, asylum-seeking unaccompanied minors’ right to reside in Sweden is highly dependent on how the Swedish Migration Agency (Migrationsverket) values their asylum claim. Yet, as ‘separated children’ (i.e., being underage and seeking asylum independently), unaccompanied minors also have specific rights and benefits both during their asylum process and after (if they are granted a stay in Sweden). For instance, unaccompanied minors are to be awarded a custodian; they have the right to a quicker asylum process; they are to be granted a residence in accommodation considered suitable for a child (either in institutional care or in a foster home); and if parents abroad cannot be traced, the official practice has often been to grant a permanent/temporary residence permit in Sweden (Migrationsverket, SKL, Skolverket, Länsstyrelserna and Socialstyrelsen, 2015).

3 Since a social problem is often articulated with reference to other interrelated concepts, an intersectional lens aids the understanding of how different structures of power intersect in the categorisation of different social groups. (See, e.g., Stretmo, 2014, for a more thorough analysis of how “unaccompanied minors” become singled out as a specific social category in a broader context).

4 In the West Sweden study, 48 interviews were conducted with 80 people—23 residential care staff, 16 teachers, 15 healthcare workers, 13 social service officers, seven custodians, and six foster parents. In the Stockholm region study, 21 interviews were carried out with 37 people—15 teachers and school healthcare workers, ten residential care staff, nine social service officers, and three custodians.