Constructing at-risk target groups

Abstract

This article explores the political legitimatization of intervention toward at-risk target groups in Danish preventive policy. Here, the overall intention is to detect social problems before they occur. Part of these preventive policies is the emergence of at-risk target groups identified as potential deviants among ‘the normal population’ of children, families and youth. We explore policy documents and find relations between political categories, social categories, perceptions of normality and risk, policy legitimization and policy tools, which we argue constitute the discursive setting for why, how and who should be objects of preventive intervention. Through a comparative analysis of preventive policy in health care, daycare and primary education, we conclude that social labeling and common sense categories play an important role in the construction of at-risk target groups. These categories function as the designators of at-risk target groups as deterministic interpretations of risk factors. We discuss why we think this might lead to unintended stereotyping and even discrimination of what was recently not part of the state's worrisome gaze.

Keywords:

• preventive policy
• at-risk target group
• political category
• social category
• normality
• risk
• policy legitimacy
• policy tools

Acknowledgments

This study was partly financed by the Danish Council for Independent Research – Social Sciences (FSE). The authors would like to thank Dvora Yanow, Marleen Van Der Haahr, Aurélien Buffat, Hanne Marlene Dahl and Viola Bureau for constructive comments on earlier drafts of the article.

Notes

1. Please note that all references to data (policy documents) made in our analysis are gathered in Table 1 and do not appear in the reference list.

2. Italicized text represents the exact wording from policy documents.

3. The following list represents the exact wordings from different documents and is not one long quotation.

4. In Danish, the euphemism used translates directly as ‘resource-weak parents,’ i.e., parents lacking resources.

5. The list represents exact wordings from different documents and is not one long quotation.