Secure Units as Emotional Sites: Staff Perceptions of Fear and Violence at Secure Units for Young People in Sweden

ABSTRACT

Secure units for adolescents are emotion-filled places for various reasons, yet previous studies have shown that fear seems to be an emotion which is difficult to deal with in these workplaces. This paper examines how secure unit staff describe their workday, focusing on fear. The analysis applies theories about emotional work as well as the concept of fear. The article builds on 53 semi-structured interviews with staff at three secure units for detained boys and girls run by the Swedish National Board of Institutional Care. The findings illustrate different ways in which staff handle emotions, such as fear, at these institutions. Results are discussed with respect to five themes: (a) the importance of control; (b) safety: not a regular workplace; (c) not my anxiety, but the young person’s; (d) security: standing safe with coworkers; and (e) the ambiguous fear. The results show the importance of taking emotions seriously in daily work, as this renders visible how staff emotionally socialize into their organization. Due to a lack of education and professional identity among staff, the socialization process is highly relevant, as it is primarily perceptions of youth and coworkers that control and develop professionalization for staff.

KEYWORDS:

• Fear
• violence
• secure units
• staff perspective
• culture

Introduction

Locked institutions for young people (henceforth secure units¹) are emotional places (Andersson, 2021a; Brown et al., 2018; Taylor, 2011; Anglin, 2002). Every young person placed in a secure unit carries with them an emotional prehistory that may include psychological harm, criminality, abuse, dysfunctional parents, failure of schooling, and being placed in care against their will and sometimes against their parents’ will. Albeit for a limited time, the unit becomes a home for these young people and thus a place where emotions have a clear place. Secure units, then, are workplaces filled with many different emotions, including anger, despair, suffering, powerlessness, frustration, joy, fear, sadness, shame, guilt, curiosity, and anxiety (Andersson, 2020a, 2020b; Andersson & Øverlien, 2021; Taylor, 2011; Anglin, 2002). In recent years, the Swedish National Board of Institutional Care² (SiS) has reported a rise in violent incidents between staff and youth in secure units: mostly in the direction of youth toward staff, although violence often is a multidirectional and complex process (Andersson, 2021a; SiS (Statens Institutionsstyrelse), 2020). In 2020, 2,498 incidents of threats and violence were reported in the direction of youth against staff; by contrast, in 2018, only 1,829 such incidents were reported (SiS (Statens Institutionsstyrelse), 2020). The causes of violence can be discussed in different ways. One way is by distinguishing between static and dynamic explanations. Static explanations for violence in secure units mainly rely on rigid and simple categories: one example would be giving young people sole responsibility when violence occurs. Dynamic explanations for violence instead highlight complexity: investigating, for example, the interactions and situations existing between the individuals involved in a violent incident, and within that, their different interpretive repertoires (Andersson, 2021a; Wästerfors, 2019). Static explanations can also be described based on Arieli’s (1997, pp. 34, 39) work which points to “downward displacement of blame” and “upward displacement of blame.” Fights and violence are explained in this way based on the personalities of young people and staff, which leads to a form of static starting point where a risk is that you are “locked in” because you feel that you cannot influence the causes. This is because people’s values and judgments are often difficult to change. However, dynamic explanations can also be described as “going concerns” (Wästerfors, 2019) which means that quarrels and violence can be understood on the basis of human interactions in everyday life, which seemingly can be worked with in a different way.

Violence is a complex and emotion-laden concept whose definition is context-dependent (Andersson, 2021b; Smith, 2020; Steckley, 2012). Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois (2004, p. 2) call violence a “slippery concept,” due to the many forms it can take. Nevertheless, violence is something that people who work with youth at secure units inevitably encounter (Slaatto et al., 2021; Smith, 2020, Andersson & Overlien, 2018; Alink et al., 2014). Violence often occurs in a panic, which indicates the importance of communication (Dockar-Drysdale, 1998); moreover, staff are expected to have the inner resources to handle violence (Braxton, 1995). “Working together” is therefore critical. This includes respecting different roles, practicing good communication, and having joint training and clear guidelines (Hicks & Stein, 2015).

Schein (1996) argues that an organizational culture entails a group of people who share perceptions, values and norms (which includes emotions), which must be conveyed in the right way to newcomers. It is, therefore, not only the characteristics of young people that determine the culture of a secure unit. Whitaker et al. (1998) show that factors influencing the culture at youth institutions also include how the staff group handles challenges, relationships within the staff group, and leadership style. In other words, an emotional culture is not just created by the employer. It takes place in interactions between staff, young people, and managers (Andersson, 2021a; Winter et al., 2019; Moesby-Jensen & Nielsen, 2015).

On the one hand, secure units for adolescents can be described as violent settings (Alink et al., 2014) for both staff and young people; on the other hand, they are also emotional settings (Andersson, 2021a; Biszczanik & Gruber, 2021; Anglin, 2002) where staff, by doing people-changing-work, are doing emotional work (Andersson, 2021a; Degner et al., 2010). A key aspect of secure units is that they combine control and rehabilitation, which is the governing principle for compulsory care: a balancing act between care and punishment (Hicks & Stein, 2015; Van Dorp et al., 2021). How they respond to these tensions can affect how they express their emotions, for example, fear. The available research on institutional care for young people in Sweden and internationally has mainly focused on describing the young people placed in institutions and the organization, content, and outcome of care (Gallagher & Green, 2012). Not much research exists on staff at special youth homes, let alone on how staff talk about emotions such as fear in their daily work, although there are exceptions (Brown et al., 2018; Van der Helm et al., 2011).

This article mainly deals with fear at secure units for youth from the perspective of the staff: the people who work most closely with the placed young people, day in and day out. Staff workers interact with young people in diverse ways in all sorts of everyday situations. Despite this, their daily work is often described as monotonous and structured, and the same applies to the daily life of the young people (Ponnert et al., 2020; Wästerfors, 2019). At the same time, their daily duties are also described in terms of various dilemmas, challenges, and tensions. These challenges and dilemmas are very much about the staff being contextually in the borderland between care and punishment, which can result in neither care nor control being exercised (Ahonen & Degner, 2014; Eltink, 2020; Inderbitzin, 2006). In previous work (, 2020ab; authors 2018, 2020) I have shown that staff have a hard time talking about fear, and resist being placed in fearful positions in a variety of ways. In this article, I use a narrative perspective to learn more about how staff respond to fear in their everyday practice. How is it that fear seems to be a forbidden emotion in this context? What happens if staff show their fear in relation to the young people and colleagues at their institutions?

Theoretical Starting Points

In this paper, I work mainly with two theoretical concepts: fear and emotional work. Regarding fear, I draw on Furedi (2018), Furedi (2006), who highlights the concept of the “culture of fear,” and Ahmed (2005), who stresses fear as something individual and a relational understanding of fear. Furedi’s main point is that a fixation on risk shapes interpersonal and relational performance through a predominant “culture of fear”: “fear informs feelings and behavior” (Furedi, 2018, p. 145). Three aspects emerge as essential in the creation of a culture of fear: first, a change in moral response to harm, where harm is personalized and regarded as a consequence of negligent actions; second, a change in the narrative about harm, where the response is created not by the disaster per se (e.g., a potential violent situation), but by overall norms and values (e.g., “the placed young people are dangerous”); and third, the evaluation of most everyday work from a safety perspective (clearly the case at SiS³). In this way, fear can influence daily work at secure units through policy documents, colleagues, and portrayals of placed young people e.g., in the media (cf. a socialization process, see e.g., Andersson, 2020b). For staff, therefore, fear could be a valuable resource, since it lends legitimacy; however, a risk also exists that violence (for example) will be normalized (Andersson, 2021a).

Furedi’s perspective is quite broad, offering a lens for making sense of society. Ahmed (2005) describes in a closer and more emotional way how fear can affect the individual on an individual level. Ahmed clarifies that fear is a bodily experience that therefore differs between different people. She argues that fear is relational and personal: for example, the statement “I am afraid” tells the environment (in this case coworkers) something about the sender (the placed young person). In this way, fear is seen along a continuum where there may be different subjects that give rise to fear. Ahmed also stresses that fear projects us from the present to the future and sees fear as a relational process involving several persons. Drawing on Ahmed, it is possible to argue that young people may be attributed with an emotional value: being fearsome. That is, fear is itself dependent on particular narratives of what and who is fearsome (often already in place). Finally, fear and anxiety are related in different ways (Ahmed, 2005; Furedi, 2018, 2006). Anxiety tends to stick to the object; but fear can also become contained in an object, as Ahmed stresses through the process of attributing to another person a form of danger.

Regarding emotional labor, Hochschild (1983) makes a sharp division between private life and work life, but this division has drawn criticism. What kind of work is it, for example, when a conversation among colleagues gradually shifts from discussing the weekend to discussing the young people they work with? In response to this criticism, Bolton (2005), for example, observes that how we handle our emotions at work also depends on how we handle our emotions privately, on our interactions with colleagues, and whether the work follows us home. Bolton (2005) argues that employees govern and control emotions in interaction with their organizations, underlining that it is not the organization alone that defines the emotional agenda, and, consequently, that emotional work is not necessarily negative or a precursor to burnout. In this way, the concept of “emotional work” emerges as more adequate than “emotional labor,” partly due to the importance of colleagues. Bolton (2005) thus expand Hochschild’s concept of emotional labor by describing different forms of emotional management where the context and the individual figure more largely in the analysis. They identify other driving forces governing emotional work, beyond purely economic ones. The social interaction of individuals in the workplace is key. In this interaction, emotional guidelines (emotional rules) are negotiated both implicitly and explicitly by parties other than the employer. Bolton (2005) points out that in care contexts, a form of negotiation takes place between two people (e.g., staff and youth) regarding emotional management. It can be assumed that emotional work is also governed by social rules which are outside what the work prescribes.

Previous Research

Smith (2020) stresses, based on extensive ethnographic material, that ward culture at youth institutions is at risk of being characterized by fear (“fear-based practice”) if young people use violence against staff (cf. the concept “culture of fear” in Brown et al., 2018). If work culture is characterized by fear, this may lead to relational aspects disappearing and a greater focus on coercion, according to the workers Smith studied and these workers saw violence as part of their everyday work. When young people and children are placed at institutions, it is often because they need support and help in the form of security and protection. At the same time, Euser et al. (2014) show that children and young people are at risk of being exposed to physical violence during their stay in an institution. Placed boys have a higher risk than placed girls of being exposed to physical violence, and the more closed the institution is, the higher the risk of being exposed to physical violence. Explanations given include staff not being trained to work with the placed young people, and institutions being organized on the basis of safety and control instead of care and treatment. Other studies (e.g., Van der Helm et al., 2011) present staff fear of young people as a possible explanation for violence. If the staff is afraid, they tend to be more rigid and repressive toward the young people, which increases the risk of violence regardless of direction.

One Swedish study looked at children who had been subjected to coercive measures at SiS institutions or in closed child and adolescent psychiatric care, and how they perceived the role of the staff in the situations that lead to violence/coercion. The children described three deeply different attitudes by staff. They first described an approach that was perceived as respectful, characterized by caring and reliability without the use of force or threats of violence. The second approach perceived as dismissive or trivializing, which led to distant and uninvolved relationships, but did not involve violence. The third approach was the one children associated with violence and threats of violence. It included crude and threatening behavior and rule-based treatment. Staff behaved punitively and were sometimes violent, and their behavior in turn triggered more aggressive behavior in the children themselves (Engström et al., 2020). It is thus reasonable to believe that staff competence and suitability are an important factor in the use of force in SiS institutions.

Staff who work at institutions for young people meet young people who have both been exposed to crime and committed crimes themselves. Drawing a sharp line between the two is often difficult. Fineman (2003) suggests that emotions associated with the respective positions of victim and perpetrator are mixed in places such as “close institutions” (p. 164) for young people. The complexity bound up in the victim-perpetrator duality can also affect staff’s professional lives: for example, by creating an experience of powerlessness. Such an experience of powerlessness may be due to a lack of education, making staff reluctant to address the young people’s difficulties (cf., Ahonen & Degner, 2014). In a major British project on staff in youth institutions that included ethnographic stays at several youth homes as well as interviews with department heads at 39 homes, Hicks et al. (1998) were able to identify different work group cultures that are produced and reproduced. The study further suggests that staff can be affected in such a way that they feel powerless in relation to both their workplace and the young people, leading to passivity in their professional practice, and explains that staff can be negatively affected emotionally.

Biszczanik and Gruber (2018) observe that secure units are characterized by “institutionalized fear” (p. 36). This means that fear is created and maintained both through how these units are organized spatially and, externally, by attributing danger to young people. Emotions can thus generate institutional cultures in secure units. These may include emotional cultures characterized by fear, strength, and/or violence, which hinder and complicate the relational work between staff and young people. British institutional care, for example, has historically been characterized by children and young people being exposed to various forms of abuse (Brown et al., 2018; Steckley, 2012; Stein, 2006). Today, this has led, among other things, to an emotional culture based on fear. The staff is afraid to physically approach the young people, as the image of the staff as perpetrators still persists (cf., Smith, 2020).

Secure Units: Context of the Study

Placing children and young people in institutions is part of social child care and social work more or less worldwide and has been perceived both as a solution and as a concern (Ainsworth & Thoburn, 2014). One criticism has been that the effect of an institutional placement is negative for the young people who are placed. However, there are divided opinions about this. Based on a meta-study Knorth et al. (2008) highlight that young people, after a period of residential care – on average – improve in their psychosocial functioning while Strijbosch et al. (2015) underline that for young people it seems to be better outcomes in non-institutional care, such as foster care, compared to institutional care. Institutional care for children and young people differs between countries, partly due to differing structures of national childcare systems (Ainsworth & Thoburn, 2014). Seen globally, institutional care for children and young people exhibits both similarities and differences when it comes to such factors as size, principles and policies, focus on care, placement based on legal or social legislation, and open and/or lockable institutions/wards (Ainsworth & Thoburn, 2014).

In Sweden, the majority of placed young people are 16–18 years old, with the girls being somewhat younger. One third reported being subjected to psychological or physical violence by a parental figure before institutionalization (SiS (Statens Institutionsstyrelse), 2019). They also reported a high degree of psychological vulnerability, including severe trust issues, depression, and suicidal thoughts (cf., Denison et al., 2018). SiS runs 22 different secure units in Sweden and every year, around 1,100 youth, mostly boys, are placed at these institutions. These young people are a vulnerable group with multiple psychosocial problems, including criminality, abuse, serious mental illness, and domestic violence.

The staff have far-reaching legal authority over the young people, including, for example, controlling their calls and deciding whether to hold them in isolation. Most secure unit workers are treatment staff.⁴ They may have a range of backgrounds and work experience, including working with young people in schools or adults in prison. In Sweden, secure unit workers must hold a secondary school diploma; an additional two-year vocational degree in social work is considered desirable, but it is fairly common to lack the vocational degree (Ahonen & Degner, 2014; Silow Kallenberg, 2016). Most workers do receive continuing education in the areas of conflict management, suicide prevention, and Motivated Interviews (MI). Staff use the conflict management tool No Power No Lose (NPNL), which is a program that includes a basic orientation in affect and conflict theory as well as training in tactical, mental, and communicative skills (de-escalation strategies). NPNL is based on a number of principles about working defensively, making sure to have a way out of conflict situations, mapping risks, and coordinating within the working group to secure the situation (safe techniques of restraint; Pelto-Piri et al., 2017).⁵ Staff are permitted to use physical restraints in the case of a violent situation, and also have the possibility to use seclusion rooms in such situations, however, the young people may be placed in isolation for a maximum of four hours. Secure units are often located in rural areas, away from other buildings, and often fenced in. Youth are largely confined to their unit, except for medical or district court visits. The most common reasons for placement are criminality, substance abuse, or other socially destructive behavior. In Sweden, placement of young people at secure units occurs via care and social services (child welfare), not the criminal justice system. Globally, youth institutions tend to be characterized by the constant presence of control and safety awareness; nevertheless, compared to the UK and US (cf., Hill et al., 2007), Nordic institutions are principally characterized more by a treatment tradition than a retributive tradition (Enell et al., 2018). Finally, although a secure unit can be understood as a “total institution” (Goffman, 1973), scholars have pointed out (e.g., Inderbitzin, 2006) that youth institutions today more often are characterized by the relationship between staff and youth, with a focus on rehabilitation and care.

Method

Participants

The data discussed in this article were collected in a research project investigating staff perceptions of violence and emotions at secure units for young people. Table 1 below describes the interview participants.

Table 1. Characteristics of interview participants (n = 53).

	Unit 1	Unit 2	Unit 3	All units
Average age	38 (min: 24 max: 62)	36 (min: 27 max: 49)	43 (min: 27 max: 61)	39 (min: 24 max: 62)
Sex	74% men	55% men	50% men	64% men
Two-year vocational degree	56%	45%	100%	57%
Average length of work experience	4 years (min: 5 months max: 16 years)	3,5 years (min: 1 year max: 21 years)	9 years (min: 3 years max 19 years)	4 years (min: 5 months max: 21 years)
Number of participants	27 (of total 40)	20 (of total 70)	6 (of total 25)	53
Type of institution	Single sex, boys – emergency, investigation, and treatment.	Single sex, boys – emergency and treatment.	Single sex, girls – emergency and treatment.

As Table 1 shows, there are differences between the three institutions; yet, the focus in this study was not on comparing or contrasting the units, but rather on seeing the data set as a whole. As Table 1 also indicates, staff work on different wards. Youth are meant to stay on the emergency (acute) wards for only eight weeks in order to interrupt very negative patterns of behavior. During that time, social services determine whether the youth should go to a secure unit for investigation of neuropsychiatric problems or to a secure unit that has treatment programs for drug abuse or crime prevention (Ponnert et al., 2020). These institutions do not differ in any way in relation to other institutions that exist in terms of, for example, target group, treatment, staff density, level of education of staff, etc.

Measures

The interview schedule was put together by the middle managers in dialogue with me. All of the interviews were semi-structured, where semi-structured is defined as “an interview that instructs the teller to focus on the relevant material” (Lieblich et al., 1998). Relevant material here included descriptions of violence and emotions. The interview guide included five themes: violence experienced in everyday work at the unit, impact of violence, relation to the youth, emotions, and coping strategies. The semi-structured interview procedure uses open-ended questions and opens the door for in-depth follow-up questions (i.e., “Tell me about … ”), leading to each interview being unique in comparison with structured interviews. Hydén’s (2014) concept of the teller-focused interview was further used to inspire the telling of narratives. The use of open-ended questions encouraged participants to share work stories, with an emphasis on violence and emotions.

Procedures of Data Collection and Analysis

Fifty-three interviews were conducted during January and May 2017 at three different secure units in Sweden. Initially, the head manager was contacted at six secure units, first via e-mail and then with a follow-up telephone call. The six units were chosen in part for their proximity to Stockholm, units were also chosen that admitted both boys and girls. If the manager expressed interest after the telephone call, a no-commitment meeting was scheduled at the unit, where I described the proposed research in more detail. I was invited to five of the six institutions contacted. I followed up the meeting at each unit within a week in an e-mail where I question explicitly asked if I might conduct research at their units. Three of the five units I was initially invited to invited me to conduct individual interviews at the unit. At this point, all the managers transferred me to a middle manager to plan the individual interviews. I did not have a particularly active role in recruiting staff for the interviews, apart from asking for a mix in terms of gender and age, and that staff would not be brand-new employees, but have some work experience. The three units that declined to participate did so with reference to the situation at the unit in terms of staff and young people and by noting that they had previously participated in various research projects, and considered that it was sufficient for the moment.

In this study I have chosen to use a twofold narrative analysis. Narrative analysis permits insight into how staff perceive and ascribe meanings of fear and other emotions to their work experience, and how their perceptions may be shaped by the immediate context, including coworker and youths. Further, narrative analysis identifies how participants and interviewer develop meaning together (Riessman, 2008). Overall, the analysis relies on Riessman (2008) for the concept of “narrative” as time- and context-bound speech organized around events in consecutive order.

The first step of the analysis draws on Emden’s (1998, pp. 35–37) “core story creation” approach, which is a means of reducing full-length stories to shorter ones to aid the analytical process. Specifically, I read all the transcripts with a special focus on nine keywords that can be linked to the concept of “fear”: threat, security, anxiety/distress, safety, risk, danger, surveillance, and control. Emplotment, or plot creation, is another way to manage and organize narratives. It is a process of reorganizing a story (Kim, 2015; Petty, 2017). In this first step, several short stories were found using the keywords as a form of emplotment.

The second step of the analysis was to generate themes, following the narrative thematic approach of Lieblich et al. (1998). The analysis proceeded in four steps: (1) Selection of the subtext, thus moving text from the whole (cf. emplotment). In this step, I read every transcription and extracted 71 narrative excerpts relating to the nine keywords listed above.⁶ (2) Definition of the content categories. The 71 excerpts were then sorted into 7 categories relevant to the research questions. (3) Sorting the categories into themes. The 7 categories were then assigned to larger themes. The technique of thematization is well-suited to this study, as it too is concerned with the content of a story: “what” is being told, rather than “how” it is being told. I identified five main themes: (a) the importance of control; (b) safety: not a regular workplace; (c) not my anxiety, but the young person’s; (d) security: standing safe with coworkers; and (e) the ambiguous fear. Within each theme, I chose several excerpts to explore in this paper that represent the core messages of the theme. Steps (1) to (3) highlight the movement between theory and empirical material in the creation of subtext (emplotment), categories and themes. Step (4) was drawing conclusions from the results. This involved formulating an overall picture of the content with respect to how staff narratively position themselves and youth when talking about fear and violent situations, and how staff describe the emotional impact violence has on them. The excerpts were chosen for being typical examples that embodied “the essential” nature of the theme (Dalen, 2007).

A theme is not necessarily dependent on quantifiable measures, but can be understood as capturing something important about the data in relation to the research question, and represents some level of patterned response or meaning across the data set. Each main theme also contains subthemes which will be highlighted in the results section. The five themes overlap to some extent; likewise, participant narratives could fit multiple themes. As for the aspect of generalizability, such claims are seldom made in connection to qualitative methodological approaches (Riessman, 2008). As Clandinin and Connelly (2000) stress, a tension exists around the aspect of certainty, because of the unconditional fact that different interpretations exist. Nevertheless, narrative analysis has limitations, one being that these forms of representation all have text and talk that represent the story incompletely selectively, or imperfectly.

The highest consideration was given to research ethics throughout the project. In addition to seeking and receiving approval from the Local Ethical Committee in Stockholm,⁷ the project also viewed ethics as an ongoing process and considered it at every stage, from the design of research questions to the dissemination of results.

Results and Analysis

For staff, working at secure units it requires an emotional commitment, not only in relation to the young people they work with daily, but also in relation to their colleagues and themselves (cf., Bolton, 2005; Moesby-Jensen & Nielsen, 2015; Winter et al., 2019). Their emotional work is thus threefold, involving relationships with young people, their colleagues and their own feelings. This makes their workplace an extremely emotional arena. The results section is structured around five themes: (a) the importance of control; (b) safety: not a regular workplace; (c) not my anxiety, but the young person’s; (d) security: standing safe with coworkers; and (e) the ambiguous fear. These themes will be highlighted from the staff perspective within the institutional frame, the workplace, using staff narratives.

The Importance of Control

Staff talked about control on three different levels: control of the environment, control of self, and control of youth people. Controlling thus becomes an important piece how daily work is organized, creating a potential breeding ground for an emotional culture (Biszczanik & Gruber, 2018; Furedi, 2018; Schein, 1996). Most commonly emphasized in staff narratives was the importance of controlling the young people, in various ways. Here is an example offered by Frida,⁸ a worker at an all-boys institution (Unit 2) whose main prior work experience was not in secure units but in adult psychiatric care. Here, loss of control is understood in relation to potentially violent young people. The possibility to use violence thus becomes a way of seeking to maintain control.

If they [the young people] are angry with one of the staff, then that’s dangerous and then we must have violence in our toolbox as a tool we can use to take control of the situation … If you lose control then it turns into lost control vs. lost control.

Another way of implicitly talking about the importance of control and thus potential danger from the placed young people is to emphasize the environment and context. For example, Lisa, a staff member at an all-boys institution (Unit 2), said:

Things that don’t belong on the ward are removed, you count cutlery, you check to make sure there are no loose screws, that everything is screwed down … that should be screwed down, and then of course you look to see that the furniture is whole and no parts are missing.

Here, Lisa describes something that came up often in the interview material as a whole: the idea that seemingly mundane interiors can be used violently, to harm, as if the workers were babysitting toddlers. Lisa clearly captures the three aspects that, according to Furedi (2018), define a “culture of fear.” During her interview she was quite withdrawn; two alarms also sounded during the interview to alert staff to potential violence, which caused her some distress. Nonetheless, Lisa stressed the fact that she and her coworkers need to be on guard, which indicates a specific culture (Furedi, 2018; Hicks et al., 1998). She believed that the young people probably think that the staff sometimes use violence against them for no reason, but said that when they (the staff) use violence, it is to protect the young people, most often from themselves (cf., Engström et al., 2020; Smith, 2020). Finally, interview participants also talked about the importance of having control over oneself, especially over one’s emotions, which is a clear sign of emotional work and of the development of emotional work as a theoretical concept (Bolton, 2005). Fredric, another worker at the all-boys Unit 2, said:

Can you control yourself to that degree, without being violent, or, can you hear what they’re saying and not give a shit? You have to be able to take shit, it’s just like manning a door [at the pub], you have to be able to take a lot of shit from people who don’t get in. To a certain extent it’s part of the deal, you know it’s coming and you have to take it, but it doesn’t mean you can go in and take them down … but there are some people who react that way, and you notice pretty quick that they’re not suited for it.

Fredric was a longtime SiS worker with a solid educational background, which is not universally the case. Here, he uses the concepts of a “pub” and a “bouncer” in a kind of parable when describing his emotionally charged work. They form a parable, not a metaphor, because he points back in time, using his own past experience as a lever to cope with his current work: “I have been through similar things.” His previous work experience also becomes a tool he uses to potentially evaluate his colleagues: “Who is up to this job?”

Safety: Not a Regular Workplace

“Safety talk” appeared prominently throughout the interviews. A common expression was, “This is not an ordinary workplace.” This is explained by the risk of violence and the overall risk within the environment of the institution, perhaps traceable to an overall image of the young people as “dangerous” (cf., Andersson, 2021a). Following Furedi (2018), staff preoccupation with safety might be understood as a fixation on various risks that shape the relational interaction and culture at the ward and institution. Sanna, a staff member at a girls-only institution (Unit 3), provided an example of how her workplace is described as different from the standpoint of violence:

It’s not like sitting in an office or customer service, if I think about my previous jobs violence is in fact a presence here, and it needs to be a presence, not the violence itself, I mean, but the idea, the thinking about security. In the end, we have to be aware that violence can occur, so yes, it is a violent workplace.

Although quite young, Sanna was one of the few interview participants with a university degree focusing on psychology. Here, she describes violence that both exists and does not exist. She clearly expressed that it was important to talk about her feelings and how her work affected her, and mentioned her body during the interview – I am small, i.e. I am not a threat – although safety remained on her mind. On the one hand her fear is personal, on the other hand relational (Ahmed, 2005). She also described various dilemmas (“Who should I help? My colleagues or the young people?”) which indicated her slight preoccupation with safety, although she was not alone in addressing this. Multiple interview participants reported a risk of violence linked to the specific environment and context. Highlighting the overlapping nature of the themes, Carl (Unit 2) spoke about safety in a way that links up with Lisa’s statement about control, quoted above:

If you want to take it that far, everything on the unit is a safety risk, a chair is a safety risk, and there are good chairs and bad chairs, but one can always go flying. There are always ways for the young people to get hold of a weapon, so to speak. We’ve found several of them where we found screws and stuff, but they never used it, which is lucky, but they do get made.

Carl had previously worked in psychiatric care, which seemed to be quite common. He was not trained to work specifically with this group of young people. He emphasized that when working at an boys’ institution, the risk of violence always exists. He was fairly new on the job, however, and he also emphasized the importance of colleagues and reflected several times during the interview based on the question “Did I do the right thing?” Staff describe day-to-day work at the ward as seemingly and continuously characterized by a security mind-set. Miranda, a worker at a boys’ institution (Unit 2), said:

So, security is always on your mind. Whenever you’re at work, you’re thinking: Where are they? what are they talking about? You have to be sensitive all the time, you have to be there all the time. You can’t sit on the couch and … I mean, you can sit on the couch and watch movies with the young people and relax, but you always have to keep your ears cocked, because at any second one of them could say something shitty to another one and you go from cozy Friday to violent Friday. So, you have to be sensitive and on the alert, you have to be. You can never get into the comfort zone, because I would say then you won’t do a good job.

Not My Anxiety, but the Young People’s

Furedi (2018) stresses anxiety as a common emotion within the concept of the “culture of fear.” Prominent in this data set, however, is the way anxiety is situated within the young people, rather the staff. Perhaps the staff’s anxiety is overshadowed by the master narrative of “the violent youth.” Sanna from Unit 3 discussed anxiety and violence as follows:

As for violence, I guess I would say, like now with [a girl, XX] who got violent because of her anxiety, that there has been a lot of explaining things away. Even though we all did it, the whole staff group, including me, that [XX] has so much anxiety and everything … you almost get a little cautious about mentioning violence by name.

Here it becomes clear that violence ends up in the background and the girl’s anxiety is foregrounded. The way Sanna or the staff group experience of the situation disappears in favor of the girl’s anxiety. Sanna’s and the staff group’s emotions are set aside, and perhaps Sanna thinks that the girl’s anxiety gets a little too much attention. Missing here, perhaps, is whether young people’s anxiety may be part of a broader understanding of violence in youth institutions (cf., Anglin, 2002). Now it is as if anxiety and violence compete for space. As noted, throughout the interview material, when anxiety came up, it was commonly situated with the young people. However, I want to stress that there were exceptions, when staff described their own anxiety and feelings of guilt. Sven, who worked at a boys’ institution (Unit 2), said:

I was involved in the situation from the beginning and it escalated, and we had to take him down. I was there watching, so to speak, but … then I got some feeling of guilt, damn, maybe we could have done it another way. We could have been clearer so that it wouldn’t have turned out like that, so I wanted to go apologize to him … I felt like there was something, some anxiety that I was triggered it a bit so I wanted to go and apologize right away, to ease my own guilt.

Sven was in his late 20s and did not have an education suitable to his job, but here he shows evidence of emotional reflection that may not always taken place among his more experienced colleagues. At the same time, he emphasized during his interview that it was important to be able to switch off his feelings at work. As the interview progressed, more complexity was revealed, as Sven also believed that staff could be tougher on young people the better the relationship was, which departs in some measure from how a good and progressive relationship and work alliance is described in the research literature (Anglin, 2002). In the passage quoted here, Sven’s regret at not intervening comes through clearly. He also mentions feeling guilty, something that was not particularly prominent in the interview material as a whole. From a relational perspective, Sven wants to free himself from anxiety by talking and apologizing directly to the youth in question. Missing, perhaps (even if we do not know what happened) is where Sven’s anxiety and guilt go vis-a vis his colleagues. Does one talk to one’s colleague about this? Sven says, both implicitly and explicitly, that they could have solved the situation in a different way. Previous studies (see e.g., Andersson, 2020a) indicate that staff members take a great emotional risk by raising such issues within in the staff group, as it implies that others have made mistakes. Perhaps talking directly to the youth does not incur the same risk. Such an emotional language may not yet really exist among the staff (Taylor, 2011). Interview participants also spoke about their relatives’ fears and anxieties about their work. Rim, who worked at the same institution as Sven, said:

I have tried to explain it to my father, who wasn’t born here, that it’s not a prison for young people, and he had a bit of a hard time understanding it before he understood, so … um … but he got scared, “It’s violent, [name of institution], you can’t work there, you can’t work there.” He was very worried at first, but then I had to explain that we have alarms, that’s part of what makes it safe. I’m not afraid to sound the alarm. It is very dangerous to work here if you are afraid of sounding the alarm, I think, because then you also expose the other boys and other staff to violence, or threats in any case. You don’t know how far it will go. I’ve had colleagues like that myself, and the way it goes wrong is that they feel stupid if they sound the alarm, and that’s very, very wrong. But I had to explain that to my dad, that I have alarms, and we are the staff, and it’s easy for a threatening situation to arise if there aren’t enough staff, too few staff who can’t see the boys, that can also be a trigger.

One way to understand this is that Rim’s father participates in an overall narrative where the young people are positioned and defined as “dangerous” (Furedi, 2018). Rim needs to handle it and she does so mainly by referring to the technical aids the staff has available (alarms). She also touches on the importance of staff, i.e. the relational aspects of the work, but this drops into the background. Rim thus needs to deal with her father’s worries: she is not worried or scared; worry and fear are situated with others. What Rim does take up as a danger is colleagues failing to sound the alarm when necessary. Instead of talking about her own potential worry/fear, she talks about the importance of colleagues doing the right thing. Rim is not alone among the interview participants in doing this, and one way to see it is as staff taking an emotional detour. In short, Rim uses safety to calm and soothe her father. Rim, in her 30s who did not have “clear” answers from outside sources, but during the interview reasoned her way to conclusions together with me: here regarding her father’s worries, and also on questions like “what is violence, really?”

Security: Standing Safe with Coworkers

Security was a major theme whose descriptions took different paths. Staff talked about security from the perspective of colleagues and their bodies. They also talked about it as if they were “different” and as something not possible to teach. Finally, security was stressed through violence: “sometimes violence is good.” As mentioned, staff security is an important aspect on several different levels, highlighting the balancing act that staff perform between protection and participation (Hicks & Stein, 2015; Van Dorp et al., 2021). On a structured level, it is evident in the “security form,” a set of questions that staff go through with every new young person who enters the institution (Pettersson, 2021). The security form makes clear that security is linked to the young person’s potential use of violence. For example, Jacob, a worker at a boy’s institution (Unit 2), said:

We actually have a form, the “security form,” and the only thing we talk about in that is violence. There are 7 or 8 questions: how should I look at you when you get upset? Do you ever use violence? How do you want us to act when you use violence? Is it okay if we take hold of you? Is it okay if we send you to your room, so you don’t interpret it as a threat? So we talk about it openly and clearly and if violence does arises, if we take one of those measures and he still gets angry … then somewhere the question has already been raised. “But you and I already talked about this. You were the one who said it was okay for me to come take hold of you and just go with you into the room and talk with you.”

The security form may be seen as a form of risk assessment (Engström et al., 2020; Pettersson, 2021). The point of departure is that the young people can get violent, so staff need to know how to deal with each one specifically. One way of understanding the form is to say that the feelings of both staff and young people are placed in it, where they seem to disappear (cf., Wästerfors, 2019 concerning journal entries). On the other hand, it is also clear that Jacob seems to find security in it, something to stick to. The form becomes a coworker, another form of emotional work. Emotional cultures are also created based on policy documents such as security forms (Bolton, 2005; Furedi, 2018; Schein, 1996). Most commonly, however, staff talked about security in relation to their colleagues. Alex, who worked at a girls’ institution (Unit 3), said:

It’s a bit strange actually, it depends a lot on who you work with, what colleagues you have. And it’s pretty awful to say that … you feel safer with certain staff and if you work one night and it’s noisy and messy but you know you have good support, then I’m basically not worried but other times if you’re with certain staff members, or temporary people filling in, or colleagues you don’t feel comfortable with, then it’s like, much more uncomfortable, so much is controlled by who you work with, that’s the way it is.

Alex was a young man in his early 30s who had had problems with violence at work (see Andersson & Överlien, 2021). In his case, it was clear that he really dared to talk about the feelings created by his work. Alex’s narrative makes it clear that colleagues are important and thus a form of security. His description is general and we do not really know what it is he is asking for. Drawing on Hicks et al. (1998), however, we might imagine that Alex requires continuity in the staff group and an opportunity to work together as a group. Feelings of security can also be linked to having experiences of violence: the more violence you experience, the more important having secure colleagues becomes (Andersson, 2021b; Alink et al., 2014). Michael, who worked at a boys’ institution (Unit 1), reasoned similarly to Alex. Michael, who was in his 40s with substantial job experience, indicates here his opinion that collegial collaboration spreads to the young people, but also points out that a strong collaboration is never stronger than the weakest link, which is why the focus needs to be on how a “good” working group can be created in this context:

It’s tough, so security is a must on the ward, and it comes from working together with your colleagues, that you know each other, that you work similarly and that you support each other. The young people also feel secure when the staff stays the same, you’ll be there the next day, next week, next month and next year. This is your workplace, you do everything so it feels good and you feel good and the young people, because that makes your job easier, but if one person a week just shows up and clocks in and out, that isn’t security, and partly the young people won’t turn to him/her, they haven’t formed any relationship with him/her, and above all they don’t feel any trust in that person and what can happen then is that things go wrong or the person answers questions wrong and goes and does things wrong.

In his interview, Michael also stressed that staff members need to “be determined” because “anything can happen,” and that staff members should not show anger. What Michael describes is, again, emotional work where certain emotions are seemingly conditioned. An additional dimension in terms of the importance of colleagues involved describing bodies. Daniella, a worker at a boys’ institution (Unit 1), stressed:

When I started work, I thought I would get some training in self-defense, but I did NPNL,⁹ but that is more about dealing with violence in violent situations, not things like self-defense. So, for example, I’m very short and a woman, and if something happens, how do I defend myself if I am alone in the gym with two boys? If something happens, what do I do? I thought it would be good to prepare, not just for women, but for everyone in case something happens, so it feels not great, because I don’t feel completely safe.

Daniella also takes it as a point of departure that the young people can be violent, which means that staff members must be able to defend themselves. Daniella refers to her body (her short height) and the fact that she is a woman, seeming to assume that she would not be able to handle a violent situation because of it. As Ahmed (2005) stresses, fear is about how different subjects position themselves. In this case, it becomes clear that Daniella positions herself based on inferiority; the risk is that she can be exposed to violence because she is a woman and also physically smaller than the boys. Daniella had an advanced academic degree from her native country, but had not validated her credentials in Sweden. She was one of the few interview participants to explicitly mention gender and her body (“I am short”). She also emphasized the importance of being aware of climate and atmosphere, and was one of the few participants who believed that more education in self-defense was needed (cf., Slaatto et al., 2021). As observed by Euser et al. (2014), staff need better training in dealing with the often-challenging behavior of youth in secure units. One consequence of this lack of education and training is that staff use different strategies for handling violence, which in turn leads to different ways of responding to violent behavior. In other words, there are different roles defined within the institution. Aspects of the security theme that were more free-floating in the material, and not always stated explicitly, include the staff describing themselves as a bit “strange” and the notion that security cannot be taught. Eric, a worker at a boys’ institution (Unit 1) described the difficulty of teaching security:

How are you secure on the job? How can you see and sense it? I usually call it a “feeling for treatment,” but it’s impossible to learn, it comes with time. There is no manual for it or guide, it is a feeling.

The notion of a “feeling for treatment” suggests that security is something you need to find within yourself. It is easy to sympathize with Eric, and perhaps it is possible to link his statement to Jacob’s remarks, above, about security forms. Together, the two statements suggest the creation of a dynamic and relational form of security (cf., Wästerfors, 2019). Security is not something you can teach, so your colleagues become extremely important in the work of creating security. Overall, education was not emphasized by interview participants, but rather they emphasized their own experiences of not having had things so easy, e.g., as young adults, meaning: “I am fit to work with this.” Finally, Tim, a worker at the same unit as Eric, along with several others I interviewed, mentioned having to be “strange” to cope with his job:

We usually joke that you probably have to have a little disorder yourself because it is not … if I talk to my friends and relatives and explain what it’s like and what can happen, then they wonder, “are you totally stupid, why would you go in there?” When I could just as easily work the checkout at a grocery store or somewhere and maybe earn a little less, but be much safer, no but I guess you have to like it.

Tim believed that staff should not be too sensitive, but at the same time he uses the family as a metaphor when discussing colleagues and young people. On the one hand, one should not be afraid; on the other hand, having collegial security was important. He does not take the potential dangerousness of young people as an explicit starting point, but addresses it implicitly, when he describes how he talks about his work to friends, for example. Instead of naming a potential worry/fear, he jokes about himself.

The Ambiguous Fear

Fear is also a big theme with several pathways. Fear is described as a positive force, but also as something negative (cf., Furedi, 2018). Sonny (Unit 1) said: I don’t think you get any bonus points for saying you get scared, at least I wouldn’t have given my coworkers any … if you get scared, I think you should look for another job. On the one hand, fear is implicitly acknowledged to exist; on the other hand, it should not be shown. What Sonny potentially creates is an emotional paradox. Moreover, staff often said of themselves during the interviews that “I am not afraid” and talked about the power of not showing fear to one another, and especially not in front of the young people. Mostly, fear was described as something negative which should not be shown to young people, which also reveals an emotional paradox related to Furedi’s (2018) concept of the “culture of fear”: on the one hand, the young people are dangerous and staff must think of their own safety; on the other hand, staff must not show fear. Miranda (Unit 2) said:

As a staff member, I think showing fear creates a weak link, but fear is also a feeling that is human, so why should we keep it hidden? It probably depends on the context. In a violent situation when a young person goes at a staff member and the staff member shows fear and the young person can feel it, then I think the staff member will end up in a violent situation again, because then they [the young people] have found his or her weak link, that’s more or less what I think … I don’t want to say, no, you can’t be afraid, obviously you’re allowed to be afraid and obviously you can show them you’re afraid, but under the right circumstances, maybe.

Here Miranda indicates that on the one hand, fear is human; on the other, showing fear in a particular context can lead to being exploited. She thus describes fear as a “weak link”; nonetheless, it is as if she is looking for a space where fear might be expressed (cf., Taylor, 2011). Interviews with some other staff also made it clear that fear and other related emotions could be something positive, even if participants who expressed that view were in the minority within the whole dataset. Sanna, from the girls’ institution (Unit 3), said:

I think it is important, above all because you should feel safe putting into words what you feel. I think that kind of thing is really really important and I can sometimes see that you have colleagues who want to maintain a macho attitude, “damn, no it doesn’t bother me,” and then … I think it’ll be very hard for them to keep that up. I want, and this is really based on myself, I want a workplace where I can tell my colleague that I’m really tired, or I’m really sad, or I’m scared, “can you help me because this is hard?”

Here, Sanna expresses a wish for coworkers to whom she can show her feelings and also talk about them. Perhaps this wish is what Taylor (2011) describes as the search for an emotional language in this difficult job. Sanna also expresses opposition to a form of macho culture that can be found in secure institutions (Andersson Vogel, 2020). Some of the interview participants clearly emphasized that they were never afraid, but that they understood if colleagues felt fear. Patric, who was one of the oldest participants at almost 60, and had long work experience, mostly in the acute wards at Unit 1, said:

I’m not scared, but I fully understand those who get scared, and it is often their own experiences or their imagination that do it, but it must be terrible to feel scared in your workplace. So I’m prepared, not afraid, if you know what I mean? I’m aware that things can happen.

Interesting here is that Patric does not position his colleagues’ potential fears explicitly among the young people, but rather points out fears usually have to do with the worker’s imagination or his own experience, e.g., or threats and violence. While he believes being prepared is important, he also describes a form of normalization where we might say that the emotions end up a little outside. Eric (Unit 1) captured in his narrative the essence of the “culture of fear” concept simultaneously with aspects from all the relevant themes: control, safety, anxiety, security and fear. Eric said:

At our institution with young people who have extremely violent behavior, which means that they all they know how to do is fight. All they know is threats to get their way, so there is usually an atmosphere of threat. I wouldn’t think … I usually tell my colleagues that we need four eyes and we should never think we know a young person, no matter what we know, things can change direction, and that has happened at other institutions, that the calmest young people harm the staff. So … there is a threat of violence, but we deal with it … a very uncomfortable feeling.

Eric mostly address the potential violence and during his interview, he talked about an atmosphere of violence and fear, while at the same time being careful to say that he was not afraid. Eric was also strict about safety and said that it is difficult to approach young people who are mentally ill. In a way, his narrative summarizes what a culture at a secure unit can contain.

Discussion

The aim of this study was to learn more about how staff respond to fear in their everyday practice and how is it that fear seems to be a forbidden emotion in this context. What happens if staff show their fear in relation to the placed young people and their colleagues? In short, it seems that showing fear can have consequences for staff: it can mean colleagues do not want to work with them, and young people can take advantage of it. The metaphor or desire to have four eyes emerges as essential for the five themes: the importance of keeping track of the situation. A common thread running throughout the interview material is that participants were able during the interview to describe and talk about feelings related to their work in a general way, but when it came to concrete situations, certain feelings seemed to be conditioned and either not accepted or neglected by staff. This tendency has come to light in previous studies (Biszczanik & Gruber, 2021), but not so explicitly as here. Seen another way, we might say that the staff at secure units do not fully have a language in which emotions can happen. Taylor (2011) highlights the emotional challenges for staff in youth institutions and emphasizes the need to provide staff with an emotionally supportive environment. This can be done, for example, by giving staff access to collegial and professional support groups. In these support groups, staff can hopefully create a language for how their work emotionally affects them. A clear paradox based on the “culture of fear” concept (Furedi, 2018, 2006) is that although staff fear is clearly implicit in this material, it is difficult for staff to express it explicitly. This gives rise to a new way of thinking about the concept of “culture of fear” by looking at fear from a relational perspective, where the situation, the context, the intention and the individual need to be considered. The following discussion takes up three topics of emotions at work: forbidden work emotions, staff’ relational competence and mentorship, and emotional rules.

Forbidden Work Emotions

One overall finding from this interview material is that, somewhat paradoxically, the possibility to use force oneself keeps one’s own feelings at bay. The need to use “violence” therefore could serve as a way to create distance from one’s own fears. One’s emotional work thus becomes one-dimensional, because one’s own feelings are, in a sense, left out (cf., Bolton, 2005). This was clear, for example, from the feelings the staff expressed, including feelings of guilt about potentially using violence against young people, not trusting colleagues, and from time to time feeling tense. Staff emotions are thus glued to both the young people and their colleagues, based on their respective positions and actions (Fineman, 2003). The emotional work of staff at secure units is partly about what feelings staff members “may” and “can” express, not only to each other, but also to the young people (Biszczanik & Gruber, 2018). This is illustrated, for instance, in the violent situations that interview participants talked about and their relation to fear. It was unusual for participants to talk about their fears, although some did. Instead, what stood out as a master narrative (Riessman, 2008) was that fear should not be shown, because if shown, fear can be exploited by young people and make colleagues less willing to cooperate. This way of dealing with emotions can be compared to one of the adaptation strategies Goffman (1973) describes from the perspective of the inmates: namely, whether the staff play a kind of role, where it is not allowed, for example, to prove vulnerable. Another way of trying to understand emotional role-playing is as follows: there is an implicit assumption that the workplace is an emotional place. What is missing are explicit emotional spaces for the staff where they can feel free and safe to express their emotions and talk about how the job affects them – which perhaps, on an overarching level, has to do with a subtle and implicit incorporation of a culture of fear.

Staff’s Relational Competence and Mentorship

In order for young people to have a good stay and good care at the unit it requires a relationship of trust between the staff and the young people: that is, a good alliance and attachment-informed care (Steels & Simpson, 2017). Therefore, it is of potential benefit for young people if staff can verbalize some of their anxieties and fear, for example, about violence. In line with Steels and Simpson (2017), who point to the importance of staff training to support for vulnerable youths, Taylor (2011) stresses that good staff practice is underpinned by a range of managerial, procedural, and resource supports, but the most important aspect is to find an adequate language with colleagues and young people about sensitive issues such as violence and fear. Young people can thus be influenced through good and strong relationships, and experiencing staff members dealing with violence, anxiety, and fear in a mature and self-reflective manner could help them learn to be more in touch with their own emotions, and reflect upon and perhaps modify their own behavior. For staff, one way to start this process is to implement “staff-support groups” (Taylor, 2011) in which staff first learn an emotional language when they can then teach to the young people. Perhaps what needs illuminating is the overall emotional culture of the institution. Among other things, an emotional culture is created based on which emotions may and may not be shown (Schein, 1996). Working in a secure unit means acting both implicitly and explicitly on the basis of different forms of emotional rules.

This article has observed that staff are not supposed to show fear in front of their colleagues and young people. This is shown by the fact that interview participants certainly spoke about incidents of violence, but often did so without an affective content. In this way, they freed themselves from being emotionally affected by the violence. A paradox of violence and emotions is formed. Violence both exists and does not exist; and emotions exist, but should preferably not be shown. This might be described more broadly as a “Janus face”: the potential violence both opens and closes potential relations between staff and young people. Maybe staff workers are trying to shape ideas about a professional identity of which violence is a necessary element. Perhaps this is a question that often arises when working in the borderland between care and punishment (Smith, 2020; Van Dorp et al., 2021). Self-reflection by staff is also an expression of the emotional work they perform, as they clearly interpolate themselves as an active subject (Bolton, 2005). Staff also say that all sorts of things in the ward environment can be used for violence and intimidation. It is not possible to avoid the emotional content of their work; the only question is to what extent they have a language for it (cf., Taylor, 2011). Wästerfors (2019) has also shown that the emotional overtones of work are rarely found in, for example, journal entries or supervision.

Emotional Rules

Following Bolton (2005), the emotional rules of the staff at institutions like secure units are created, maintained, and reproduced mainly in interaction with each other, without the involvement of the employer. It is also clear that the private emotional rules of staff affect work in the workplace. Workers need support and help in identifying the different emotional rules that govern their work. This again shows the need for reflexive rooms, for example, professional supervision or structured collegial supervision. This is important because emotional rules can generate emotional cultures that in the long run could be destructive for both staff and young people (Brown et al., 2018). Only when the emotional rules are identified can staff develop strategies for dealing in a professional way with the violent incidents that come with their job. Hence, it would be more productive for staff to address the tension between categorization and the particular situation in which violence, for example, occurs (cf., Wästerfors, 2019). We might think about the extent to which emotions become a work tool or whether, paradoxically way, this becomes emotional work without emotions. Staff describes a form of holding as an intervention with young people if they are angry or violent. Perhaps this helps staff not to feel powerless, something they otherwise commonly experience (Ahonen & Degner, 2014).

The finding of this study that the daily working life of staff is to some extent characterized by emotional activity contrasts with previous research where it is described as monotonous, structured, and uneventful (Wästerfors, 2019). Although it may seem as if nothing is happening, being in this particular context means internal activity for staff, which may not always be visible to the outside world (cf., Andersson Vogel, 2020 on slowness vs. stress). What emerges from staff narratives here is important, as it points to a form of emotional activity that has not previously been considered. Security is created through collegial cooperation; Hicks et al. (1998) stress that good collaboration and good relations in the working group can curb passivity and repression and that there must be room for reflection. This in turn highlights the fact that the staff group is of considerable importance when emotional cultures and emotional rules are formed, both on an implicit and explicit level, in addition to what the employer stipulates (Bolton, 2005).

Limitations

One of the limitations of this study has to do with generalizability. Even though the number of participants was quite high for a qualitative study, generalizability to other secure units and staff is difficult. As such, this study does not address how representative the various emotion strategies are. More and larger studies are needed: both in-depth qualitative studies on the staff perspective and larger quantitative studies where it would be possible, for example, to measure staff exposure to violence and physical and mental state (the work environment). It is also worth emphasizing that since these interviews were conducted, SiS has invested in, and received government funds for, strengthening overall security at all secure units due to escapes, mainly by boys. Safety and control of the young people are thus more clearly on the agenda now, compared to when the interviews were conducted. Another limitation is that in-depth information on other professionals working at secure units was not collected. Further research with staff members and other youth professionals would add to our understanding of the challenges in secure units in general. A final limitation of the study is its focus on the micro-level emotion management of staff, mostly regarding fear, at the expense of the macro-level’s importance for how staff use and think about emotion strategies and feeling rules on an overall organizational level.

Implications

It is possible to describe the themes identified here as an expression of organizational shortcomings – a culture – in which the staff are trapped. The characteristics of this culture can be described as follows. Firstly, the culture includes how the staff perceives the young people: dangerous and violent versus vulnerable. This can have consequences for how they do their work and their opportunities to establish relationships with young people. Staff need help and support in uniting the division of young people into a whole. Secondly, staff sometimes normalize the violence of young people and sometimes do not reflect on their own potential to use violence through their special powers. In this way, there is a risk that violence in the workplace, regardless of direction and form, will be perpetuated. This complicates relationship building, and the explanations for the violence remain static. Thirdly, staff do not always dare to show, or are not always able to show, certain emotions. A risk then arises that secure units are contextualized as controlling institutions instead of emotional and caring institutions. This affects both staff and young people, as it can create distant relationships between them. We might also say that staff in this study do not have a language for the pain the job brings; this has also been seen in previous work (Anglin, 2002; Taylor, 2011). Enduring the young people’s pain is one of the most important tasks staff have. Historically, secure units were created for boys and employed mostly men; now about a third of placed young people are girls, and a third of staff are women. As Roesch‐Marsh (2014) notes, girls at institutions are often described as being vulnerable and exhibiting risky sexual behavior, while boys are not described as vulnerable but instead as acting out physically. Therefore, based on the current study, further research should, in line with international research, focus on the organizational climate and working conditions of staff, as this can improve both care for young people and the working environment (Eltink, 2020).

Bulleted Practice Implications

1. Work in secure units needs to be conceptualized as emotional work due to the emotional geography of the institution.

2. How staff perceive young people—dangerous and violent versus vulnerable have consequences for how work is conducted.

3. Staff do not always dare to show certain emotions, which risks leading to a contextualization of secure units as controlling instead of emotional institutions.

4. Fear is a prominent emotion, but staff who show fear take a big risk in relation to young people and co-workers.

5. Staff must be given the opportunity to develop an emotional language for their professional everyday life, for example, through supervision.

Disclosure Statement

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

Additional information

Funding

Department of social work, Stockholm university

Notes

1. Where compulsory care for youth is provided.

2. The board that oversees and manages all state-operated compulsory care facilities (secure units) in Sweden.

3. https://www.regeringen.se/4a95f6/contentassets/87853e4278034b23a2f70a555293a908/uppdrag-om-forstarkt-sakerhetsarbete.pdf

4. In some other countries, the profession in question is referred to as “social pedagogy,” and training takes place in the university system, see e.g., Steels and Simpson (2017).

5. See, Van Dorp et al. (2021), Denison et al. (2018), and Steckley and Kendrick (2008) for an international overview of physical coercive measures available for staff at youth institutions similar to the Swedish secure units.

6. Threat (15), security (10), anxiety/distress (6), safety (15), risk (5), danger (10), surveillance (0), and control (10).

7. Reference number 2016/2165-31/5.

8. All names mentioned are fictitious.

9. No Power No Lose (NPNL) is Sis’ conflict management method (cf., Slaatto et al., 2021).