Proximal or peripheral: temporality and spatiality in young people's discourses on gender violence in Sweden

ABSTRACT

This article explores how young people in Sweden talk about and understand violence, with a particular emphasis on how violence, gender, space and time are co-constructed in this discourse. We found that young people display an ambivalent attitude to violence, reinforcing several contradictory discourses of violence. Young people adopt various understandings that place violence differently in time (ongoing vs. past) and space (distant/absent vs. close/present). They discursively construct the school as a non-violent space while considering digital spaces to be violent. Yet, they still find that violence occurs at different places and times at school. These ‘discursive manoeuvres’ highlight how views on violence that territorialises and re-territorialises places as being ‘safe’ or ‘unsafe’ is part of the gendered spatial regulation of young people's lives. By specifically analysing time and space in young people's discourse on violence, this article contributes to research on their perspectives on gendered violence.

KEYWORDS:

• Views on violence
• young people
• gender regulation
• discursive manoeuvres
• violence as proximal and peripheral
• territorialisation
• re-territorialisation

Introduction

Research on violence tends to focus on its extraordinariness, framing it as ‘out of place’ from everyday socio-spatial experiences. However, studies of young people's daily lives have shown that many forms of violence are perceived as mundane, trivial and are therefore normalised. According to Percy-Smith's and Matthews’ (2001) landmark study on ‘tyrannical space’, Andrews and Chen (2006) found that children's relationships at school are shaped by ‘geographies of fear’. The commonality of violence among young people may contribute to this normalisation; such violence among children is trivialised because it is regarded as being a part of growing up. Violence is also gendered. Scholars have noted that gender violence among young people may be particularly difficult to address because both young people and broader society tend to normalise and trivialise it – indeed, they do not frame or interpret it as violence (McCarry and Lombard 2016). Broadly speaking, ‘gender violence within schools includes physical, verbal, psychological, and emotional as well as sexual violence; it also includes the fear of violence, both between females and males and among females or among males’ (Leach and Humphreys 2007, 53, italics in original). Violence can also be perceived as ‘messing around’ and be related to humour (cf. Lahelma 2002; Rawlings 2019). In this article, we explore how young people in Sweden talk about and understand violence, with a particular emphasis on how these discourses co-construct violence, gender, space and place (cf. McCarry and Lombard 2016). We have opted for a broad definition of gender violence in our analysis as our interest lies in how violence is talked about, made sense of and understood by young people. Our research subjects perceived many violent situations as violence, but also displayed ambivalence towards violence. Their perspectives on violence were contextual and situated, and their talk about violence draws on and reinforces contradictory discourses, depending on whether they perceive violence as proximal or peripheral. Thus, the various understandings of violence adopted by young people place violence differently in time (ongoing vs. past) and space (distant/absent or close/present). These ‘discursive manoeuvres’ (Rawlings 2019) highlight how talk about violence territorialises and re-territorialises places as being ‘safe’ or ‘unsafe’ (Sack 1986) and is part of the gendered spatial regulation of young people's lives. By specifically analysing time and space in young people's talk about violence, this article contributes to research on their perspectives on gender violence.

Gender regulation and young people's perceptions of violence

We use violence as an umbrella term, although we have incorporated relevant research on bullying into our literature review since some practices and situations commonly labelled as bullying may involve violence. Bullying is ‘a system of ordered performances, centred on complex inclusions and exclusions related to dominant gendered subjectivities’ (Rawlings 2017, 266; cf. Benjamin et al. 2003; Søndergaard 2014). Research has shown that what constitutes violence is contextual, contested and ambivalent (cf. Forsberg 2017; Gunnarsson 2018). The young people who Lombard (2015) interviewed associated ‘real violence’ with adult men. Violence between peers and siblings (even physical) tended to be normalised as ‘unreal’. Age, gender, space and proximity were key part of this process. Although some of the girls questioned the boys’ ‘violent’ actions against them, they had few discourses to draw upon, and their perceptions were not validated by others/adults. Interestingly, their own experiences of more fluid (albeit restricted) and changeable gender identities contrasted with what they understood as being inevitable and rigid adult gender identities. Both the boys and girls often justified violence in adult heterosexual relationships, which were understood to be naturally characterised by inequality (Lombard 2015). Rawlings (2019) suggests that discursive acts – what she terms ‘discursive manoeuvres’ – are part of the continuous negotiation of what violence ‘is’ (see also Carrera-Fernández, Lameiras-Fernández, and Rodríguez-Castro 2018). In her study on bullying in Australian secondary schools, she found that when discussing violence, both teachers and students drew on hegemonic discourses of bullying. These worked to contest and resist what counts as bullying (cf. Ringrose and Renold 2010). For instance, while teachers framed bullying incidents in essentialist and trivialising terms (cf. Sundaram 2014 for similar findings among young people), the students adopted social discourses of ‘joking’ and humour to ‘avoid the charge of violence’ (Rawlings 2019, 710, see also Lahelma 2002; Owens, Shute, and Slee 2005), thereby contributing to the ‘gaming of violence’ (Ringrose and Renold 2010). Rawlings found that these discursive manoeuvres function as ‘contextual resistance to addressing gendered violence’ (ibid., p. 719). Thus, individuals do not necessarily use them consciously but instead rely on forceful and pervasive hegemonic discourses based on essentialist, individualist understandings of bullying as a phenomenon.

Failing to acknowledge the gendered dimensions of bullying and violence legitimises social hierarchies and normalises normative identities (Rawlings 2017, 2019). It reinforces dominant gendered perceptions regarding who commits violent acts and makes it more difficult to ‘see’ violence (Lunneblad and Johansson 2019). Discursive acts contribute to the regulation of gender. Gender is made intelligible through the iterative and heteronormative construction of bodies and acts. This process of intelligibility is key to how we are interpreted and how we interpret ourselves as gendered subjects (Butler 1993). Rawlings (2017) asserts that the disciplinary responses to how gender is or should be read are ‘corrective’. Young people invest in discourses and practices that enforce gender regulation, discursively monitoring and resisting abject identities. Analysing young people's views about violence captures the mundane character of gender regulation: what practices and situations are common or normalised, accepted or contested, undesired or desired? This enables a more situated account of how power operates in violent situations, as well as in discussions about them – and how social and material dimensions become important.

Everyday discourses on violence shape and are shaped by young people's practices. Talk is performative, and is part of the ‘doing’ of both gender and violence (e.g. Ringrose and Renold 2010; Rawlings 2017). Conceptualisations of violence have been closely associated to perceptions of gender (Andersson 2008; Sundaram 2014; Lombard 2015). In their study of secondary school students, Ryan and Morgan (2011) found that two discourses permeated the teachers’ and students’ views on bullying: bullying as irrelevant and bullying as inevitable (cf. Rawlings 2017). They argue that the linguistic resources used by students and teachers in assuming or assigning certain subject positions to others (such as bully or victim) are part of and re-construct the culturally available discourses and repertoires of gender and violence. Talk, then, is ‘never trivial’ (Ryan and Morgan 2011, 31) and talk about violence can be a rhetorical resource for ‘doing’ gender (Andersson 2008) that impacts perceptions of gender, violence and violence interventions.

Spatialising young people's violence

Evans’ review of geographical work on young people (2008) notes the significant contributions of geographers to spatialising theories of youth (and age more generally; see also Aitken 2001). Holloway and Valentine (2000) argue that geographers studying the everyday experiences of space and place of children and young people, as well as the spatial discourses used to construct the meaning of childhood/youth and their spaces, have identified and critiqued essentialist notions of childhood and youth by illustrating the importance of place. Collins and Coleman (2008) argue that geographers have paid far less attention to schools than to any other institution, even though in many ways they are ‘central to the organization of everyday life’ (282). Catling (2005) argues that schools are adult places that matter to children and young people, and are perceived in different ways (Tuan 1977; Cresswell 2004). In essence, many schools are similarly designed, even though their actual architecture might vary:

Particular spaces are for learning – classrooms, the games/assembly hall, the library area – while others are routeways – the corridors – or provide other daily necessities – the cloakroom, toilets, the car park. The largest space of all – the playground – is to spend the ‘time out’ from formal learning, to get fresh air, to let off steam, though not too exuberantly. (Catling 2005, 326)

While identity formation in school has received a reasonable amount of interest beyond geographical inquiry, the socio-spatial dimensions of schooling have not received sufficient attention. Currently, one way of spatialising violence appears to be taking centre stage. ‘School violence’ has emerged as its own field of research (Furlong and Morrisson 2000). Various types of violence that take place in school are grouped together and analysed using the school as a context or as a significant institution in the everyday lives of children and young people. McKinnon, Waitt, and Gorman-Murray (2017, 146) argue that schools are key sites for shaping gendered and sexualised subjects, in which discourses and ideas inform the ‘layout of schools and classrooms; the lessons (what people do); codes of moral behaviour (social interactions) and the formation of students’ gendered and sexualised identities’. Research on the gendered use and design of primary school grounds has illustrated how girls and boys use the school grounds differently, thereby creating gender-segregated spaces (e.g. Thorne 1993; Renold 2004). As Spark, Porter, and de Kleyn (2019, 193) state, gender(ed)

repetitions do not unfold in a vacuum – they take place in a context saturated with meaning, already configured by institutional structures and socio-cultural realities and intensively conditioned by physical space. (Messner 2007)

We are interested in how empirical research illustrates highly gendered (ideas of) school-ground practices that reinforce dominant discourses of gender. Thus, individual practices can be understood to (re-)territorialise certain places at school (Sack 1986; Thomson 2005; McKinnon, Waitt, and Gorman-Murray 2017), constructing places that are ‘straight’, ‘gay’, ‘girls’, ‘boy's’, ‘safe’, ‘unsafe’, etc. Territoriality means spatial segmentation as a source of power, and requires a continuous effort to establish, occupy and maintain (Sack 1986). In other words, territorialisation is exercised when individuals perceive a place to be significant – or ‘other than neutral’ – and manage it through sociality (Thomson 2005, 64). However, the spaces of encounter are not fixed territories but rather ‘fluid spaces of interpersonal interaction’ (Percy-Smith and Matthews 2001, 53) that establish social and spatial identities. We argue that territorialisation can be established through talk. According to Agnew (2000), territorialisation moulds behaviours and is accomplished through talk and other practices. Places comes to matter to young people and both construct and reconfigure space and subjectivities. Children and young people shape their own places in school and beyond, both socially and materially and, in turn, are shaped by both sociality and materiality. Schools are productive spaces (Lefebvre 1991): sites where knowledge, power and discourse are interwoven (Rawlings 2017) and where social relationships are continuously reproducing and reconfiguring space (Massey 2005). Consequently, we understand space ‘as a simultaneity of stories-so-far’: that is, as a ‘product of relations-between’, comprising multiple interrelations (Massey 2005, 9).

To conclude, research has highlighted the role of space and place in young people's lives in general, and schools in particular, and a handful of geographical studies has examined bullying and violence in schools. Researchers generally treat educational sites like schools in either social or spatial terms, but rarely as socio-spatial arenas. Scant attention has been paid to how space and place are constructed in young people's attitudes and meaning-making concerning gender and violence, including bullying (cf. Lombard 2015). Research on young people's talk about violence has not addressed the close connection between time and space or how discourses on violence appear to rely on temporal and spatial conceptualisations. We therefore concur with Rawlings (2019) that we must understand young people's constructions of violence in order to grasp its meanings. Our analysis will further develop theoretical frameworks on gender regulation by addressing the spatial and temporal dimensions of talk on violence and territorialisation, by highlighting the role of violence and temporality.

Material and methods

The material was collected as part of an evaluation of a universal gender-transformative violence prevention programme, Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP).¹ This Swedish programme was introduced in upper primary and secondary schools (13–19 years) in 2015 as part of a universal and systematic project to combat men's violence. The research project studied six schools that were implementing the programme in parallel with the evaluation. The ethnographic material includes video recordings of lessons, field notes from lessons and teacher-training sessions, as well as group interviews of students and teachers. Quantitative and qualitative measures were used to evaluate the MVP programme (Eriksson, Gottzén, and Franzén 2018; Gottzén and Franzén 2019), and part of the full range of ethnographic material has been analysed by Bruno et al. (2020). This paper focuses on analysing the interviews: 15 group interviews comprising 26 students at five of the six schools in the evaluation project.² The schools that the young people attend are located in four medium-sized to large municipalities throughout Sweden. In one of the municipalities, the interviews were conducted with students from two different upper secondary schools. Both of these schools offer vocational programmes (construction, hairdressing etc.), with a student population reflecting the social stratification of Swedish society at large.³ The other upper secondary school is located in the city centre of a medium-sized municipality, and offers both vocational training and pre-university education, making it more socio-economically diverse. The two secondary schools are centrally located in their respective cities. One of the schools has a heterogenous but predominantly white middle-class student population and is located in a middle-class residential area, whereas the other school comprises a primarily socio-economically disadvantaged student population.

Group interviews are particularly useful for examining everyday framings of issues, language use and cultural beliefs, as group interactions can reveal reactions that are otherwise inaccessible. A homogenous group in terms of gender, age, ethnicity and social class usually facilitate engagement in group discussion (see e.g. Clark 2011; Krueger 1994). The participants were asked about their perceptions and experiences of violence in school and the extent of violence and its causes, as well as their experiences of participating in the programme. This study does not directly analyse the latter questions and is consequently not part of the MVP programme evaluation. However, ambivalence in the participants’ talk about violence may be partially linked to their participation in the programme.

The dialectical analysis moved back and forth between previous research, data, theory and shared reflections in a deductive manner. The focus was more on the content than the interaction among the participants. We first read the interview transcripts and marked the sections discussing violence, both explicitly and implicitly (e.g. experiences of unsafety; Berg and Lune 2012). We then re-read these sections and noted where violence was understood to take place (location), when and by whom it was perpetuated (time and relationship) and the students’ perception of violence in their own words (real or unreal, fun, immature, safe or unsafe). We then applied the theoretical concepts presented above – territorialisation, normalisation and discursive manoeuvres. In this process we reflected on the inconsistencies and ambiguities in the material. Gradually, three overarching themes emerged: locating violence; the intimacy of social relationships and temporal distancing; and expanding gendered tyrannical spaces and girls’ sense of safety.

Processes of (re-)territorialisation of places

One pervasive pattern to emerge was the ambivalent perceptions of violence, as the young people tried to contextualise and situate it in various ways. This ambivalence is nurtured by contradictory discourses on violence, conceptualised as either proximal (present) or peripheral (distant or absent). Young people discursively place violence in space (distant/absent or close/present) and in time (ongoing or in the past). An analysis of these themes uncovers how violence is located and made locatable, and how the meaning of violence is constructed based on the intimacy of social relationships and on temporal distancing.

Locating violence

People involved in bullying as perpetrators, bystanders and victims are acculturated into the social and spatial knowledge of school geographies, that is, they become aware of the place and time of bullying (Andrews and Chen 2006). Such knowledge might lead bullies or bystanders to adopt spatial tactics ‘which maximise the social impact of bullying whilst reducing the possibility of being caught’ (Andrews and Chen 2006, 242). The effect of bullying extends beyond the actual location of the encounter, creating a more extended space of tyranny for victims (ibid.). When students talked about violence and the programme, violence was constructed as being both present and absent. The concepts of bullying and (physical) violence were used in parallel, and the frameworks of absence vs. presence were associated with space. On the one hand, violence is perceived as happening everywhere. At one of the schools, for example, the girls mentioned how some of the boys threw chairs in the classroom and that another boy stole a carving knife from the crafts class and walked around threatening other students with it. One girl laughingly exclaimed that they ‘used to have a really rowdy class and you didn't get any peace because of the violence; there was violent stuff going on at least twice a week’. On the other hand, some students were unsure as to whether there was really any violence at their school. One group of girls produced the following exchange:

3: I’ve never seen bullying at this school, I mean, serious bullying, like physical bullying. You see people maybe fighting, but it's just for fun, or then both of them laugh – it's what I’ve seen, anyway, but I’ve never seen any real bullying, which you’d really notice. But it certainly goes on all the time in ways you don't notice.

2: Yes, it really does. It must also have happened here sometimes, but I think … Do you show … ? Do you go … So where do you go? I don't understand … .

4: I think it happens more on social media these days.

… 

2: Yes, because before, I think you fought more, like physical violence.

… 

3: I think it goes on much more online [nowadays]

On the one hand, ‘real’ bullying is considered to be something out of the ordinary that does not take place at the participants’ school. If it had happened, they would have noticed it. On the other hand, they refer to play fights they have witnessed but don't consider to be real violence. And one of them agrees that violence they are unaware of or do not notice is certainly going on. Violence is divided into real violence and unreal/non-violence, with the boundaries between them shifting and situational (Uhnoo 2011; Lombard 2013, 2015; McCarry and Lombard 2016). One interviewee was unsure about where such ‘real’ – physical, noticeable, present – violence took place: ‘where do you go? I don't understand’. The school does not appear as an institution made up of spatial practices that produce sociality (Lefebvre 1991) but merely as a physical building – and violence is imagined to occur in particular places in the school. The interviewees then addressed a certain progression in the space of violence, which was said to have transgressed or moved beyond its materiality and into the virtual realm. Thus, the interviewees highlighted social media as the new space for violent behaviour, while offline physical violence has disappeared. This discourse about violence can be seen as being part of a process in which violence simply disappears from view and becomes placeless and detached from lived realities.

At that same school, some students suggested that the building's architecture prevented violence from happening. To be seen or spotted was easy, according to one of the girls:

The school is quite small; it doesn't have big spaces where you are hidden. The corridors, ‘the light halls’ [spacious recess rooms in the school] and so on. There's nowhere you can really stand and not be seen.

This can be related to the previous quote, in which the participants discussed where someone would actually go to engage in violence. The students appeared to perceive the school's architecture as – if not preventing, then at least obstructing – violence. However, the underlying rationale is that people do not engage in violence if they risk being seen. Violence, then, is understood as being carried out in hidden places, whether out of sight or outside the material realm.

Thus, violence is conceived as being located somewhere – if it takes place. It is also constructed as something that takes place beyond the physical spaces through which young people move, and outside their closest social relationships (which we will return to below). They describe violence as being locatable in space. While the school is not a site for violent situations, the students describe how violence can erupt at parties, in the city centre or online. One group of female students appreciated the opportunity to openly discuss realistic scenarios of sexual violence without being judged for drinking alcohol (thereby placing themselves at risk):

Girl 1:

There was a house party, a girl was raped and several people realised they were in the room with this guy [the rapist], but no one intervened. ‘Why didn't anyone intervene, why didn't anyone care that she was plastered and went into that room with this guy? Maybe she didn't want to – someone should have checked first’. This is how it is. It happened. It’ll happen again. Perhaps even this weekend – it may have happened last weekend.

Girl 2:

And I think it's very good [to be able to talk about it] because it's very much, well, they say like, because young people drink, and then many adults say ‘no, we rather not talk about you going to parties’. Still, parties and stuff happen, and young people go to parties.

Girl 1:

It's not like it happens often that someone gets dragged into the loo at school … 

Girl 2:

No, well, exactly. Exactly.

While discussing a film they had seen, the students emphasised that sexual violence is more likely to take place at parties than at school. Thus, not only is sexual violence constructed as something that takes place in certain spaces, these places also take on the meaning of being more sexually violent for girls. Parties are constructed as places at which gendered vulnerability is explicit.

The participants also described certain places at school as being particularly prone to violence: indoors (as opposed to outdoors, except the football pitch), corridors, the benches outside classrooms (see e.g. Astor, Meyer, and Behre 1999; Vaillancourt et al. 2010; Sikhakhane, Muthukrishna, and Martin 2018). A reflection by a girl discussing safe places further highlights this spatialisation of violence:

We talk a lot about environment and places, where the safe environments are, where students consider it to be safe, right? Because people talk a lot about what's unsafe.

… 

It's good to know that, too. But if you’re feeling unsafe at school and you mention the safe spaces, which many students regard as safe, then you’d like to go there, if you’re feeling unsafe … . We never find out where the most … What students actually consider to be the safest place.

The girl raises the issue of the locatability of safe spaces and problematises what she deems to be a narrow focus on the lack of safety when discussing violence and vulnerability. She appears to suggest that if there is violence and unsafe spaces, then there must also be spaces where violence does not take place. However, the re-territorialisation of any defined safe places is attempted but not accomplished. Some research has investigated bullying spaces – places that are considered unsafe, dangerous or even hazardous (Vaillancourt et al. 2010). Astor, Meyer, and Behre (1999, 3) found that violent events appeared to occur ‘primarily in spaces such as hallways, dining areas, and parking lots at times when adults were not typically present’. These spaces were regarded by school staff and students as being ‘unowned’ or undefined public space. The girls identified more unsafe places than the boys, which Astor, Meyer, and Behre (1999) suggest could mean that unowned and undefined public spaces are more threatening to girls.

Young people adopt discursive manoeuvres that rely on two co-existing understandings of violence that they use in parallel when trying to construct meaning and create narrative coherence: either knowing exactly when, where, with whom and how violence occurs due to pre-defined universal categories; or violence perceived to be a sociospatial contradictory accomplishment that reproduces the gendered order. The first understanding can be traced to a thriving dominant discourse on bullying that continues to permeate understandings of – and interventions in – school violence in many countries (Ringrose and Renold 2010; Rawlings 2017). The second understanding emanates from feminist research on violence. The role of these discursive manoeuvres is to territorialise and re-territorialise space and place to the extent that some spaces are constructed as safe, while others become unsafe or violent. This process of (re-) territorialisation is a key part of the practices of gender regulation and is further implicated in the multiplicity of young people's interrelations with place and social life.

The intimacy of social relationships and temporal distancing

Another prevalent theme is the association between violence and intimate social relationships. Young people viewed close relationships with peers as being generally protective to violence, thus constructing violence as – if not impossible, then at least harder – to perpetrate on those with whom you are closest, such as friends or family. However, according to some interviewees, intervention is harder among close friends:

Should I intervene here between my friends? Or how do I tell my friend ‘no, I don't think that was okay’? We have talked about being brave enough to intervene, in friend groups as well, because it's so much harder to tell your friend ‘no, I don't think that was right, I think this was wrong’ than to say it to someone you don't know. Because I care about what my friends think about me. And you don't want to be excluded.

Committing violent acts against friends and also intervening when a friend behaves violently places violence in unfamiliar terrain and breaks with the cultural conceptions of violence as something that is distant. Having to deal with violence as something that is present and potentially real creates ambivalence. These ‘grey zones’ of blurred boundaries challenge the predetermined conceptions of what violence is, who carries it out, who is subjected to it and where it takes place; they are part of the negotiation of the cultural meanings of violence. Rawlings (2019, 699) argues that ‘moments of violence only qualify as such when there is contextual and discursive assent’ (see also Ringrose and Renold 2010), making grey zones particularly interesting to explore.

For example, the discourse on play fights illustrates how they are regarded as being dependent on the closeness of the relationship between the involved parties. These activities are a social accomplishment, in which negotiations around boundaries (peer group, internal-external displays of emotions, etc.) are key. One boy explained:

I think that if you sort of know the person and have been best friends with this person and really feel you can trust them, then I think maybe if you have a play fight with them, then it's not the same thing – then you get it. But if I don't know a person in the class that well and then you maybe get to know each other but you don't really know their boundaries, then I think it's a bigger deal. But it's rather ridiculous when someone tells off to two people who are ‘tight’ and are only play fighting.

Being popular or having a high status in peer groups, or having close relationships with friends or partners, is regarded as a form of protection from violence, because these people could intervene in violent situations. By framing bullying incidents as ‘messing around’, as unintentional and unfortunate mishaps, as partially justifiable and inescapable, and being a victim as something which should be avoided at any cost (particularly by the boys), the students can attain and claim positions that personally benefit them (Ryan and Morgan 2011; Uhnoo 2011; Rawlings 2017). It was more common for girls to describe play fights as being immature or ‘unnecessary’, although many voiced their ambivalence about enjoying them, yet finding them childish and unnecessary:

Girl 2:

I think they’re rather unnecessary.

Interviewer:

Ok, how do you mean?

Girl 2:

No, but really, you never know whether they maybe don't want to and it's the other one who thinks it's fun. Even though the other one laughs, they may still feel differently on the inside. I think it's rather childish. Sometimes it's more fun than other times, but I find it rather unnecessary.

Play fights are described as a ‘fun’ accomplishment between the involved parties but can easily develop into something more serious. The girl in the excerpt positioned herself as a spectator and bystander, distancing herself from any kind of involvement. Play fights were almost exclusively associated with boys (Uhnoo 2011; Lombard 2015). The girl in the excerpt was unsure about how to understand play fights but felt that they should be regarded as ‘childish’. This kind of violence is imagined to occur in less mature relationships, such as those between younger children. Play fights are framed as being a natural part of boys’ growing up but should ideally evolve into a more mature form of socialising.

Expanding gendered tyrannical spaces and girls’ sense of safety

Young people often place ‘real’ violence outside the school or associate it with certain problem students. Even though the interviewees offered nuanced reflections on violence, they tended to equate ‘real’ violence with outright physical confrontations. The discourse on play fights was ambivalent for both girls and boys. Thus, both ‘real’ violence and play fights were strongly associated with the boys. Only the girls discussed sexual violence and they associated it exclusively with girls. Girls repeatedly stated that most sexual harassment takes place online rather than at school, thus constructing the virtual realm as being more violent than school. They never connected online activities with school space. ‘Slutshaming’ and other types of sexualised hatred or violent control on social media affected young girls’ sense of safety at school. In one group interview, the girls discussed an Instagram account on which the boys at their school used to post pictures and leave derogatory remarks about the girls. They felt threatened by the risk of being ‘slutshamed’ on Instagram. In the excerpt below, the girls discuss whether this kind of harassment or cyberbullying is exclusive to or primarily an act performed by young boys – and thus a sign of immaturity – or whether adults also do it.

Girl 1:

I would say that on this Instagram account they are young boys. I don't think a grown man would do something like this. It's more like the bad behaviour of young boys. Still, it makes me feel unsafe at school. I feel like, what if someone posts something … 

Girl 2:

How could someone feel they had the right to do that?

 

 … 

Interviewer:

And how often would you say you see and hear this kind of violence and violent acts?

Girl 2:

Very often. Very often.

Girl 1 initially suggests that online sexual harassment should be interpreted as the bad behaviour of young boys, a discourse close to this course of popular and developmental psychology that is often used to frame sexual harassment and violence as being a sign of immaturity and lack of discipline (Gillander Gådin and Stein 2017). However, she remarks that such posts make her feel unsafe at school. Violence in cyberspace affects social space at school. Girl 2 problematises the boys’ sense of entitlement and self-claimed right to post such things:

Girl 2:

But on social media you also see older people attacking young people. There's one girl in our school who has quite a popular blog and she once posted a photo of herself in a bikini. And perhaps it's because it was a woman doing this to another girl. Maybe it's more difficult to understand than if it had perhaps been a man who … It feels like women come up with more specifically offensive remarks when she says ‘you were badly raised and your parents are bad people’ and ‘you are a bad person if you think you have the right to post photos of yourself skimpily dressed’.

Girl 1:

But I also think that as a woman you have the right to post photos. Because if I go abroad, of course I’ll wear a bikini every day. And I’ll wear shorts. So, you don't have the right to sexualise each other's bodies. But it's so easy nowadays. It's so easy with social media.

Girl 2 asserts that adults (men and women) also engage in these disciplining responses (Rawlings 2017) towards young people online. Consequently, she partially rejects framing this kind of violence as a sign of immaturity and therefore inevitable, like the ‘boys will be boys’ attitude of Girl 1. Girl 2 also finds it more difficult to understand and cope with derogatory remarks and ‘slutshaming’ by women; from men, at least to some extent, it can be interpreted as something that normalises male privilege and abuse. Girl 1 then shifts her framing and emphasises her right as a woman to wear whatever she wants without being sexualised. The word right is repeated several times during the interview and the girls appear to shift from framing violence as non-real to framing it as real and as having unacceptable implications. Several studies have documented the adverse effects of cyberbullying, online hate and harassment of children (Gagliardone et al. 2015; Crooks 2017; Sylwander and Gottzén 2019). Nevertheless, social media is a significant and inseparable part of many young people's lives. Research indicates that social media may also function as a source of peer support, empowerment, feminist resistance and friendship (Sylwander 2019; Perez-Aronsson, forthcoming 2020). Mobile phones have played a particularly transformative, yet not fundamental, role in young people's lives and relationships. They appear to extend existing patterns of victimisation and risky behaviour, thereby spatially diffusing risk and vulnerability and expanding the ‘tyrannical spaces’ of violence (Pain et al. 2005).

Spatiality and temporality of gender violence in young people's everyday lives

Scholars have suggested that violence is continuously negotiated in various settings and appears to be particularly ambiguous in young people's lives. Tyner (2012) highlighted the paradox that ‘violence is both everywhere and nowhere’. Violence is both present and absent, spectacular and extraordinary, yet hidden and normalised, depending on how it is interpreted and understood. We found that young people address, understand and construct violence in ambivalent ways and adopt discursive manoeuvres that perpetuate discourses on violence as either proximal or peripheral, as well as reinforcing particular spatial and temporal perceptions of it. The interviewees more often perceived violence as ‘real’ if they viewed it from a distance in space and time; ‘realness’ also depended on the degree of intimacy in their social relations. ‘Real’ violence, they suggested, occurred at parties or online, a long time ago when the perpetrators were more immature, or was committed by other unknown young people outside school. This discourse co-constitutes violence and space, making violence both hidden and noticed, located and locatable in specific places, relationships, bodies and situations. Discussions of where, when and how violence unfolds and who is involved are part of the territorialisation and re-territorialisation of certain spaces as being ‘violent’ or ‘non-violent’, ‘safe’ or ‘unsafe’. The students discursively constructed the school as a non-violent space, whereas digital social spaces were considered to be violent. Their understanding of violence relied on spatial and temporal discourses that contribute to a gendered (re-)territorialisation of everyday space. According to Massey (2005), these (re-)territorialisation processes are open-ended, continuously reshaped and point towards gender regulation as not only a social accomplishment but also as something that is highly spatial.

Our analysis highlights a normalisation of violent spatialities in young people's everyday lives at school. Violence was normalised by framing violence as ‘unreal’, fun and an inevitable part of growing up. There are no violence-free zones. Young people – mostly boys – provided many examples of violence as being fun or as messing around. They stressed that it was important for everyone involved in play fights to have the right intention and feeling about such acts. Most of the interviewees had a common understanding of violence – no longer ‘as fun’ but not too severe – as a sign of immaturity and a problem of order. Previous research on bullying shows that this representation of violence is part of the problem and exacerbates the harassment and violence in young people's lives (Ellwood and Davies 2014; Carrera-Fernández, Lameiras-Fernández, and Rodríguez-Castro 2018). A more nuanced understanding is required: violence is everywhere and ever-present and serves to maintain and conform to established gendered and aged social orders.

The young people tended to construct the school building and outdoor areas as being partially protective, since they offered nowhere to hide. Another disparity emerged: the ‘real’ violence taking place online, exemplified by the boys posting photos and slutshaming certain female schoolmates. This had implications for the girls’ perceptions of safety at school. The girls explicitly questioned the boys’ ‘right’ to engage in disciplining sexualised cyberbullying. By describing this harassment as an unacceptable abuse and a latent threat, these girls did not contribute to the normalisation of violence – quite the opposite. The gender regulatory practices in which students engage clearly contribute to how violence is differently perceived and materialised. Nevertheless, social media may function as a space in which support is shared and intimate friendships develop (Perez-Aronsson, forthcoming 2020). We interpret violence as something that potentially creates and serves to maintain close relationships with peers. It is essential to understand violence contextually; not as isolated events but instead as something that is enmeshed in spatial and temporal processes that individuals make sense of from a situated and age-determined perspective. Schools are important everyday sites in young people's lives and ‘school’ does not merely represent a physical place or building, nor is it the only institution or space in which violence is carried out and enacted. A further investigation of how young people make sense of violence in their everyday lives, particularly at the intersections of gender, time and space, is critical.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

The evaluation study was funded by the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions. It has no grant number.

Notes on contributors

Tanja Joelsson

Tanja Joelsson is Associate Senior Lecturer in Child and Youth Studies at the Department of Child and Youth Studies, Stockholm University, Sweden. Her research focuses on qualitative explorations of children's and young people's geographies and everyday mobilities, particularly related to questions of violence, social equality and sustainability.

Linnéa Bruno

Linnéa Bruno is Senior Lecturer in Child and Youth Studies at the Department of Child and Youth Studies, Stockholm University, Sweden. Her research interests include sociology of childhood, feminist theory and social policy, particularly in relation to interpersonal violence and child abuse in the welfare state.

Notes

1 This study was approved by the Regional Ethics Board of Uppsala (2016/067).

2 Interviews and observations were conducted by Anna G. Franzén and Lucas Gottzén.

3 The Swedish school system rests on ‘the free school choice’ principle, where parents and students are free to apply to any school they wish to attend. ‘Choice’ is exercised by educated middle-class parents, further accentuating ethnic and socio-economic segregation (The Swedish National Agency for Education 2018).