Violence in urban schools: school professionals’ categorizations and explanations of violence among students in two different demographic areas

ABSTRACT

The present study explores how officials in Swedish secondary schools define and categorize situations in which students have been exposed to violence in the school. The study is designed as a case study of two secondary schools, situated in two demographically different urban neighbourhoods. The results indicate that different socio-economic conditions influence how professionals categorize and explain violence, but also what strategies are used to deal with different incidents. In the socially disadvantaged area, there is closer collaboration with the police, and filing police reports is more common. In the school located in a middle-class area, professionals handle similar situations by collaborating with parents and using diagnoses as the main explanation for students’ problematic behaviour.

KEYWORDS:

• Secondary school
• social class
• stigmatization
• urban
• violence

Introduction

In Sweden, the tendency of schools to treat unruly behaviour, bullying and violence as crimes is partly a new phenomenon. Compared with most European countries and the US, Sweden has been viewed as an exception, focusing on care and social pedagogical measures instead of punishment (Estrada, Pettersson, & Shannon, 2012). Furthermore, Sweden has long been known for its progressive ideals and great emphasis on equality (Englund, 2016). However, during recent decades, the Swedish school system has undergone a number of reforms that have transformed it into an educational market (Bunar & Ambrose, 2016). The past decade has also seen an on-going political debate about the failure of the Swedish school. In this debate, students’ lack of discipline and low motivation have become the explanations for their poor academic performance (Larsson, Löfdahl, & Pérez Prieto, 2010). This discussion of the so-called ‘crisis in schools’ is not only found in Sweden, however. In Europe, the UK provides another example of how the debate on crisis in schools has become a world-wide phenomenon of growing proportions (Brown & Munn, 2008, p. 220). Ball, Maguire, and Braun (2012) describe a development in the UK in which students’ behaviour has become the subject of political debate about quality and academic outcomes. In Sweden, similar arguments have led to a situation in which student behaviour previously described as teasing, fighting and ‘school trouble’ has been positioned within a legal discourse, transforming such behaviour into a police matter rather than a pedagogical challenge (SFS, 2010: 800, Report 2005/06:UbU4). This increased regulation by law, and individual legal entitlements on issues previously described as moral, social or psychological, has been described as a process of juridification (Gibson, 2013; Larsson et al., 2010; Magnussen & Nilssen, 2013).

In the present article, we wish to contribute knowledge about how the process of juridification is being played out at schools located in areas characterized by different socio-economic conditions. Since the 1990s, Sweden has witnessed a fast-growing income gap between families living under poor conditions and those belonging to a growing middle class (Beach & Sernhede, 2011). This has contributed to a heavily segregated residential market, which, in turn, has led to major differences between schools located in different areas (Andersson, ÖSth, & Malmberg, 2010). Previous research has also shown how contextual factors in the neighbourhood influence students’ risk of encountering crime or their inclination to commit crime (Gottfredson & DiPietro, 2011). Further, studies have revealed that, among both victims and offenders, there is an over-representation of children growing up in socio-economically disadvantaged circumstances and neighbourhoods (Estrada et al., 2012).

However, in the great majority of research in Sweden and the Nordic countries, as well as in a much of the research from other post-industrial countries, violence and conflicts among students at school have often been conceptualized as bullying (Hymel & Swearer, 2015; Thornberg, 2015). Most of these studies have been concerned with investigating bullying typologies and finding psychological dispositions and fixed personality traits among bullied students (Ringrose & Rawlings, 2015, p 82). Violence is often articulated as the effect of the behavioural problems of individuals, rather than as originating from complex sociocultural, economic and political discourses, which underpin the practices of individuals and groups, as well as institutions (Robinson, Davies, & Saltmarsh, 2012, p. 9). Furthermore, only a few inquiries have explored school professionals’ perspectives on school violence (Marshall, Varjas, Meyers, Graybill, & Skoczylas, 2009; Yoon & Bauman, 2014).

Aim and research questions

The overall aim of the present study is to investigate how school professionals relate to and understand the various measures taken to deal with school violence. We will focus on how school officials at two schools located in two different socio-economic areas describe how they handle occurrences of violence in school. Violence in schools is a complex issue, and several definitions have been used to describe the kinds of acts that include both name-calling and school shootings (Stone, Astor, & Benbenishty, 2009). In the present article, we use ‘violence’ as an umbrella term for acts that violate someone’s dignity through physical acts, threats, rumours, mockery and exclusion (Robinson et al., 2012). We are especially interested in the influences the contextual factors in educators’ narratives have on situations involving violence. Ball et al. (2012) describe context as a mediating factor that is specific and unique to each school. Here, contextual factors refer to how educators describe the situation at the school, as well as how they describe the school’s status and reputation, the students attending the school and the support they receive from (expectations they have of) relationships with parents and other agencies. From this perspective, we explore how the educators categorize and explain situations of violence, as well as their narratives about the actions taken to deal with these situations.

The following research questions are addressed in the study:

1. What explanations do the school officials use to describe why situations of violence occur?

2. What strategies do the school officials use to deal with situations in which students have been subjected to violence?

Survey of the field

Violence in schools is a global phenomenon (Stone et al., 2009). However, much of the research on how contextual factors, such as race and class, affect school professionals’ management of such violence has been conducted in the US (DeVoe, Bauer, & Hill, 2011; Robinson et al., 2012), where there is a long tradition of legal actions dealing with violence in schools (Brown & Munn, 2008). Many urban schools in the US employ security personnel and police officers who work on a daily basis (Coon & Travis, 2012). In comparison, taking legal measures against students is a new phenomenon in Sweden. Surveillance, security controls and the presence of security personal are a rare exception (Vainik, 2013).

In Sweden and the Nordic countries, research on bullying has been the predominant perspective when exploring violence in school. Bullying has been defined as a subtype of aggressive behaviour that is repeated over time and in which groups or individuals humiliate, attack, and/or exclude other individuals (Olweus, 1978). Swedish, as well as international research has primarily focused on the causes and risk factors associated with bullying, as well as on the effects of social support systems and anti-bullying programmes (Hong & Espelage, 2012; Thornberg, 2015). This research shows that educators often have a strong tendency to focus on individual students’ problems, rather than on problems caused by contextual factors (Hymel & Swearer, 2015, Ringrose & Rawlings, 2015). One explanation is that psychiatry and psychology play a major role in measures used to deal with students with these kinds of behavioural difficulties. Consequently, models and programmes used by professionals to manage ‘problems’ in schools are often based on psychological theories (Hjörne & Säljö, 2014; Rafalovich, 2005).

Research has demonstrated that teachers’ expectations of students and their families have a great impact on the strategies adopted when ‘problems’ occur (Smolkowski, Girvan, McIntosh, Nese, & Horner, 2016; Yoon & Bauman, 2014; Wun, 2016). There is a wide range of research indicating that poor students and students from minority groups are more likely to be subjected to punishment than are white middle-class students (Gregory, Skiba, & Noguera, 2010; Kupchik & Ward, 2014; Smolkowski et al., 2016). Researchers in the US have argued that the high level of police involvement and security measures have contributed to general criminalization of disciplinary problems in schools located in socially disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Scholars have argued that the zero tolerance policies established to make schools safe are often used to discipline black students for behaviours ranging from physical violence to ‘talking back’ (Wun, 2016). Research has also shown that students growing up in socially disadvantaged neighbourhoods are overrepresented in the statistics on suspended and arrested students (Crenshaw, Ocen, & Nanda, 2015; Kupchik & Ward, 2014). The viewpoint that the right way to handle behaviour problems is through legal action has been branded as the ‘school-to-prison pipeline’ (Wun, 2016, Gregory et al., 2010). The overrepresentation of minority and poor students in prison bears witness to the on-going reproduction of inequality (Wacquant, 2008).

In Sweden, increasing residential segregation has led to significant differences between schools (Beach & Sernhede, 2011), such that disadvantaged and immigrant groups are concentrated to certain schools. Schools seen as ‘immigrant schools’ are associated with poor school performance and a poor working environment for students and teachers (Bunar & Ambrose, 2016). According to Milani & Jonsson, 2012), in the media and public mind, the immigrant student has come to be synonymous with a violent and unruly young man. Over time, reproduction of these standard images by the media has had an impact on how educators and other professionals exercise their authority (Beach & Sernhede, 2011; Estrada et al., 2012).

Questions of violence in Swedish schools and how to handle the phenomenon professionally must be understood in relation to the strong Swedish welfare state, which is characterized by relatively equal rights and opportunities for all citizens. However, changes in the Swedish schools and society, described above in the introduction, can be seen as a decisive transformation of views on crime and punishment, a transformation also seen in several post-industrial countries (Estrada et al., 2012). Consequently, the changes described above have influenced school professionals’ understanding of violence. We hope the present article can generate further knowledge about these processes.

Setting and empirical data

The study is designed as two interlinked case studies (Becker, 1970). The schools selected are two comprehensive schools located in two different socio-economic areas, in one of Sweden’s metropolitan areas. The purpose of this design is to allow us to discuss and analyse how the juridification of the Swedish school has been manifested in different contextual conditions. Our interest is especially in how school professionals relate to and understand the various measures taken to deal with school violence.

Seaside school is located in a neighbourhood with approximately 30,000 inhabitants, 50% of whom were born outside Sweden. Five hundred children, 6–16 years of age, attend Seaside School, and about 70 school professionals are employed there. Municipal statistics indicate that, in the surrounding neighbourhood, the proportion of unemployed adults is higher than average, and that the average income is lower than that for the greater metropolitan area. Park School is located in a small city with 50,000 inhabitants, with a mixed population in terms socio-economic background. There are students with lower-middle-class backgrounds, as well as those with middle-class backgrounds. Seven hundred children, 6–16 years of age, attend Park school and about 80 school professionals work there. In the surrounding neighbourhood, approximately 12% of inhabitants were born outside Sweden. Municipal statistics indicate that the proportion of unemployed adults is lower than the average, and that the average income is higher than that for the greater metropolitan area.

In the present article, we specifically focus on school officials working in the student welfare team. The student welfare team is responsible for preventing and handling situations of violence. In Sweden, all schools are required to have a welfare team, including the principal, a school nurse, a counsellor, and a special education teacher; sometimes other school officials are involved. At Park School, we interviewed the principal, the school psychologist, the counsellor, the special education teacher, and the school assistant. The school assistant has no formal pedagogical education or academic degree. The school assistant’s role is to interact with students informally in places, such as corridors and during lunch breaks. Given this role, the school assistant often gains insight into students’ social relations and notices whether there are any conflicts between students. At Seaside School, we interviewed the principal, the counsellor, and the special education teacher twice. We also intended to interview the school nurse and school psychologist, as well as other school officials responsible for students’ well-being, but for various reasons it was difficult for professionals at Seaside School to find time for interviews.

The interviews lasted from 45 min to one hour, and all were held at the respective schools. We posed open-ended questions, which allowed the school officials to describe in their own words what they classify as violence. In order to cover the study’s research questions, the interview guide was divided into four main sections: (1) questions about the school’s historical background and present situation; (2) questions about how the school officials handle situations where they suspect that violence has occurred; (3) questions about the school’s collaboration with other officials; and (4) questions about equality plans and other kinds of action plans. Using content analysis, we searched for the categorizations, explanations, and strategies school professionals used in relation to situations where violence had occurred. We read these statements in relation to contextual factors, such as how the school professionals describe their schools and the neighbourhood, and the relationships and interactions with parents, students, and other authorities. The study was conducted in accordance with current research ethics guidelines (Vetenskapsrådet, 2011). This means that all participants received information about the purpose of the study and gave their consent to participate, and that the names of all informants and of the two schools surveyed are pseudonyms.

Methodology and conceptual framework

The study takes a sociological-narrative perspective. The term ‘narrative’ refers to the stories the school officials use to explain why situations of violence occur and what strategies they use to deal with situations in which students have been subjected to violence. Narration entails a categorization of the situation. Processes of categorization are thereby related to how individuals frame their experiences in relation to a social and spatial context. The concept frame includes a duality, partly capturing the school professionals’ subjective categorizations of various events, and partly influenced by organizational principles at the school that affect how a particular situation is classified, thus regulating what seems sensible, normal, and possible (Giddens, 1984; Goffman, 1974; Hacking, 2004). Schools’ obligations are guided and influenced by various laws, such as education law, discrimination law and social welfare law. In various fields – such as education, child and adolescent psychiatry, and social services – institutional discourses have been established for documenting, interpreting, explaining, communicating and managing the problems that occur in the different areas (Foucault, 1977; Hacking, 2004). In the analysis, our focus is on how such institutional discourses constitute resources for the school professionals’ narratives and contribute to shaping their understanding of situations of violence (Czarniawska, 2006). School officials establish different ways of categorizing situations, not least depending on which discourses are predominant in different fields. Categories can therefore also contain both support for and constraints on which understanding seems most plausible. Oftentimes, there is a dynamic interplay between the categories used by practitioners in different areas and the concepts and theories articulated in reports, research, inspections, and investigations of those practices. Thus, by studying the dual structuring process, we are interested in discovering how social practices are repeated and how certain patterns of understanding are reproduced (Giddens, 1984)

During the analysis, we have searched for narratives displaying how school professionals categorized situations defined as problematic. First, we have analysed which categories were foregrounded in school officials’ narratives concerning how situations of violence were explained. Second, our reading has focused on school professionals’ strategies for interpreting and solving problems. While we cannot generalize from our analysis, we hope it can promote a deeper understanding of how contextual factor influence school professionals’ ways of handling violence.

Results and analysis

The presentation of the results is structured around three analytical themes that emerged in our analysis: (1) Categorizing the situation; (2) Explaining the situation; (3) Strategies for handling the situation.

Categorizing the situation

In this section, we focus on how the school officials categorize situations in which violence has occurred. School officials encounter students with different needs and backgrounds. This indicates that schools have to deal with a wide range of situations and dilemmas on a daily basis. Students’ conflicts and unruly behaviour are a constant element of these dilemmas (Ball et al., 2012). Categorization of such situations can be viewed as a first step in bringing order and trying to find a solution (Hjörne & Säljö, 2014; Jenkins, 2000). The interviews at Park School show that the professionals seldom used terms, such as offender and victim when categorizing conflicts among the students.

It may also be that the ones who are victimized can offend other students by acting in ways that make others go crazy. It may be that they need to come to some agreement, so that the situation becomes manageable for all involved (Counsellor, Park School).

The narratives are framed based on students’ social relations to other students, rather than as criminal behaviour. Conflicts are referred to as a result of students’ individual problems and difficulties. One recurrent explanation provided by the school officials at Park School was that students who are exposed to violence might themselves expose other students to violent acts. The school psychologist at Park School elaborated on this argument.

It may be a diagnosis the student has that leads to conflicts. It may be that the student has difficulties adjusting to others. Some students have problems reading others’ faces and body language and knowing how to act in different situations. (School psychologist, Park School)

This narrative is framed within the perspective of the field of psychology and medicine. From this viewpoint, the students involved in ‘problems’ are categorized as having personal difficulties and labelled with a diagnosis, rather than being connected to legal concepts. The following example from Seaside School shows how situations of violence were framed in a different way.

Writing the reports … There are many situations that are difficult to categorize, so it’s not about a student saying that he has been exposed to harassment, … more that they were playing soccer, and then someone came and snatched the ball, or there was a misunderstanding, because they don’t speak the same language, and then name-calling. (Principal, Seaside School)

Different perspectives clearly intersect in the reasoning about students’ violent behaviour. Categorization of situations where violations may occur was interpreted within the framework of knowledge areas, such as education and social work, where relations between students, teachers, and the social environment are foregrounded. At this school, day-to-day misunderstandings, as well as students’ bilingual background, are described as playing a crucial role. The professionals’ reluctance to define situations in terms of victims and offenders can be understood as a strategy to make school life manageable. It is not possible to react to and act on each incidence of bumping someone or of name-calling among students. However, according to the officials, once the conflicts get started, the students’ cultural backgrounds and identities can be factors that cause conflicts to escalate.

They often use religious threats. They say; ‘So are you Sunni or are you Shia? You are not the right kind of Muslim; you are not a real Muslim. You have not acted in the appropriate way.’ These are arguments they use in those fights. (Principal, Seaside School)

On the one hand, the school officials speak of violence as a consequence of everyday misunderstandings; on other hand, there is also an awareness of the effect of global conflicts. Compared to Park School, the professionals at Seaside School do not refer to children by using diagnoses, or try to frame violent situations in terms of offenders and victims. Thus, these situations are framed neither as medical nor as juridical concerns. At the same time, the students’ background is more clearly present in these stories, compared to similar stories from Park School. The professionals describe how students use religious identities to define their adversaries and to win support among their peers. Much of the research done at urban schools in the US has highlighted violence in the neighbourhood and gang-related violence as part of the problem (Crenshaw et al., 2015; Kupchik & Ward, 2014). In the narratives from officials at Seaside School, contextual factors are given a wider meaning. Consequently, global conflicts between ethnic and religious groups also are described to play a role in schoolyard conflicts.

Explaining the situation

At both schools, conditions in the students’ home environments were used to explain why situations of violence occur. However, the influence of students’ home environment was framed in different ways at the two schools. The school officials at Park School emphasized the personal and the local.

I think that we are privileged here. There are few students who are really problematic. Often they resolve the situation by themselves, and after a while they become friends again. Most of the students have known each other since preschool, they all live in this area. It’s very familiar. The parents know each other; they meet at the local supermarket and see each other at the local shopping centre. At least they know about each other. Our students have older or younger siblings, who may have studied in the same class (School assistant, Park School).

In the educators’ narratives, Park School and the surrounding neighbourhood are described as rich in social resources. Common places to meet, social networks, and personal relations are emphasized as important factors that protect students from getting involved in crime or being victims of crime (Stone et al., 2009). In narratives depicting the school and the neighbourhood as safe places, violence and problems were portrayed as exceptions.

Almost all of the students have parents who care. However, there are some parents who can’t really manage their role as parents. There may be separations or alcohol abuse; there may also be drug abuse. There may be homes that are violent. The students often act out in school, and schools may not be the best environment if you have these kinds of worries and aggressions. (School assistant, Park School)

Families with problems are used as a contrast to normal families in the neighbourhood. In this narrative, the students’ family situation becomes the explanation for some of the ‘problems’ they have at school. From one perspective, this can be interpreted as the school professionals being self-reflexive, because they are saying that school may not be the best place for students with problems. At the same time, in this narrative the students remain the bearers of the problems and the family the reason for them. This tendency to locate the explanation for school violence outside the school was also found among professionals from Seaside School. However, this is framed in relation to socio-material factors, such as overcrowded apartments and poverty.

This is a poor neighbourhood where many parents receive social welfare support and live in overcrowded apartments. It’s easier to understand the situation when you know about students’ daily frustrations, that there is a queue to the bathroom, that you don’t have time to brush your teeth before school and then I [the student] come late to school because I had to go to the toilet, and everyone can’t sit down at the kitchen table at the same time at breakfast so I skipped breakfast today, and ran over here [to school] and was late to class and the teacher said that I was late again. (School counsellor, Seaside School)

At Seaside School, the explanation for situations of violence start from contextual factors, such as the fact that students and their families are living in economic hardship and overcrowded apartments. Previous studies have shown the impact socio-economic conditions have on young people’s future life chances in general, but also specifically related to the risk of being subjected to violence (Estrada et al., 2012; cf. DeVoe et al., 2011). The school officials’ narratives about Seaside School were also strongly influenced by how they imagined their school in relation to other schools.

One of the reasons that we have low self-esteem at this school is that every year you can read in the local news that we are the worst school in town. The effects of this cannot be underestimated. Like … When the municipality planned to establish a new soccer field. Then they said, it couldn’t be located here, because then the field would be vandalized. (Special education teacher, Seaside School)

The professionals at Seaside School describe how they are affected by negative representations in media reports about the school. Similar findings can also be seen in research from the UK. Ball et al. (2012) identified how contextual factors, such as school rankings affect teachers’ understanding of their professional work and how they view their students. When school officials at Seaside School refer to the situation at the school, they do so in relation to notions of what it is like at other schools in town. One-sided and negative media representations of disadvantaged areas contribute to separating different areas and different groups in society – and for the people living in stigmatized areas, this creates a sense of being the other (Milani & Jonsson, 2012). Several studies at urban schools in the US have shown how teachers and students feel they are doubly exposed, not only to the violence present in everyday life, but also to responses to their situation from the police and other authorities (Kupchik & Ward, 2014; Coon & Travis, 2012). In the following example, the school counsellor at Seaside School expresses her view on the students’ situation.

We are aware of the social injustice, there are great differences between schools located in different areas. This can be a reason for our students to act out and vandalize. There is a widespread feeling that there is no hope. We are asking whether we should really take our students to a partner school in a wealthy neighbourhood, and then when they get back to our school, it looks like this. This is something that creates a lot of frustration. It can lead to vandalism at school. That’s how we often argue. (School counsellor, Seaside School)

The school officials’ explanations illustrate how the overall picture of each neighbourhood and school influences how various situations and problems that arise are interpreted (Bunar & Ambrose, 2016; Sernhede, Thörn, & Thörn, 2016). At Seaside School, concepts and categories related to youth crime and social deprivation are frequently used. The narratives about Seaside School can thus be understood in relation to what Wacquant (2008) describes as a social process of territorial stigmatization. Wacquant discusses how such narratives have the effect of creating uncertainty and frustration among the residents and people working in those areas. There is a clear difference here compared to Park School, where the problems were said to emerge from personal problems in the students’ families. In the following section, we will look more closely at how the way in which problems were categorized and explained affected the professionals’ strategies for dealing with these problems.

Strategies for handling the situation

Since the 2000s there have been changes in the Education Act, and in the recommendations from the Swedish National Agency for Education, regarding how educators should act in situations of conflict. As discussed above, a juridical discourse has become part of the curriculum. This is something we can discern in our data. However, we can also see clear differences in how the juridification of the Swedish school affects the strategies professionals at the two schools use to deal with school violence. In the example below, the principal at Park School gives voice to this depiction.

We want to end the conflict, and then start a dialogue with the students and inform the parents. The counsellor meets the students, maybe also their mentors, or some other teacher. But also the parents, it’s important to get their point of view; the parents are an important part of this. (Principal, Park School)

The principal’s strong focus on relations and communication can be interpreted as coming from a social pedagogical perspective. Emphasis is put on the importance of initiating communication between the students and on informing the parents. The families are viewed as resources and part of the school strategy to handle the problems that occur. However, this can also be seen in another light: when schools compete on a market, building trustful relationships with ‘costumers’ becomes increasingly important (Beach & Sernhede, 2011; Bunar & Ambrose, 2016).

We inform, and have a dialogue with, the parents of the student who is victimized. The parents may be the ones who are most upset and worried, more worried than the student, not that surprising if they know their child has been exposed. (Special education teacher, Park School)

Maintaining overall good and trustful relations with parents is a way to both prevent and handle problematic situations at school. This is also expressed as one of the key factors in the school’s strategy. Some incidents had been reported to the police, but their rarity was also illustrated: A couple of years ago there was this situation when a student brought a knife to school, I believe that was reported to the police (Special education teacher, Park School). The interviews at Seaside School give a different picture of the strategies used to deal with violence. In the following example, the counsellor at Seaside School talks about how they work together with the police.

We have a very close collaboration with the police. The local police spend a lot of time here, to get to know the students, establish a relationship with the parents. So there’s a close collaboration between the police and the school. (School counsellor, Seaside School)

Seaside School’s strategies for addressing situations in which students are exposed to violence are part of the overall social efforts in the neighbourhood where the school is located. At Seaside School, the social services work closely with school officials to target students who are categorized as being in the risk zone for committing crime. Part of this work is to develop trust and collaboration with families in the neighbourhood. However, in our data, collaborating with parents is sometimes described as problematic.

There is a strong Somali community in this neighbourhood. They have their own traditions, which I’ve never really, really grasped./…/There is a strong framework for how this should be managed. Parents whose son or daughter has made a mistake, done something wrong, will try to make it right within a certain time frame/…/The parents often want the principal, or someone else from the school, to be involved. (School counsellor, Seaside School)

Parents’ involvement in handling conflicts is framed as a risk for conflicts of interest. Compared to Park School, it is clear that, at Seaside School, the parents are not viewed as resources in the same way. As part of the agenda at Seaside School, there seems to be some desire to teach families how to integrate into Swedish society. From this point of view, reporting incidents to the police is described as a strategy for creating trusting relationships with parents and students, or as the principal at Seaside School said: We have to show that we trust in the police and this society. Therefore, we call the police when something serious happens. At Seaside School, the strategies for fighting crime in the neighbourhood were embedded in the school’s strategies for handling violence. At same time, officials expressed ambivalent feelings about the fact that the police were managing problems at school: I can also feel that it is a weak society that leaves everything to the police. It’s a signal to the children, saying that we adults cannot solve this; that we were forced to leave it to the police (School counsellor, Seaside School). One of the main explanations, offered by school staff, was that there was a risk that students at their school would be treated more harshly than students from other more affluent schools.

The crime here is handled much more harshly. I have experience working as a principal at another school in a different kind of neighbourhood. The problems there were treated in a different way. (Principal, Seaside School)

The problems at Seaside School are described as being of a different character and therefore are treated more severely. The situation at urban schools in the US differs in many ways from Sweden, but there are also similarities. Previous research has shown how school professionals in urban schools in the US, much like those in the present study, express their reluctance to use law enforcement in schools, feeling they are losing their mandate to decide how best to handle the problems (Coon & Travis, 2012). There is also an expression of anxiety over the possibility that police involvement may lead to the criminalization of disciplinary problems at schools in socially disadvantaged neighbourhoods (Gregory et al., 2010). However, even though there are great differences between the two countries, it is clear how the overrepresentation of blacks, minorities and the poor in prisons stands as proof of the on-going reproduction of inequality both in the US (Wacquant, 2008) and in Sweden (Estrada et al., 2012). These inequalities are also reflected in the narratives about the strategies used to handle violence at the two schools under study here. Research from the US stresses that differences between students’ academic outcomes and behaviour problems in school should be understood in relation to the long history of racism in US society (Crenshaw et al., 2015; Kupchik & Ward, 2014). Similarly, critical researchers in Sweden have underlined the importance of Sweden’s role in colonial history to understanding the increased economic and social gap between the majority population and the people who have come to Sweden as refugees (Sernhede et al., 2016).

Conclusions and discussion

The aim of the present article is to contribute knowledge about how the process of juridification is being played out in the Swedish school. This process can also be seen as part of a broader international debate on school crises that is linked to concerns about school discipline. The overall objective has been to explore how school professionals relate to and understand the various measures taken to deal with school violence. The analysis has focused on how contextual factors influence how school officials – at two schools located in two different socio-economic areas – talk about dealing with occurrences of violence in school.

The results show that although the schools are governed by the same laws, situations of violence are viewed and managed in different ways. At Park School, situations in which students were subjected to violence were explained in terms of problems in their families, such as alcohol abuse, mental illness, or separations. In these narratives, expertise from fields, such as social work and, specifically, knowledge developed in family research were often used as resources. In the school officials’ narratives about how to manage and prevent violence, social networks and parental involvement were mentioned as important assets.

At Seaside School, contextual factors, such as poverty, overcrowded living and social injustice, which caused frustration, were used as explanations for the risk of violence among the students. Research has also shown how media representations are becoming part of collective narratives that facilitate hierarchical distinctions between places and the people living in them. The school officials’ narratives about their schools and neighbourhoods were in many respects consistent with how schools and similar disadvantaged areas are characterized in reports and research in the social sciences. This can be understood as applying the concept of double hermeneutics: a mutual influence between the categories used by the practitioners and the discourses formulated in the research, reports, interventions, reviews, and studies.

The present results also show how the influence of contextual conditions on situations in which students were subjected to violence was managed differently at the two investigated schools. At Park School, creating a dialogue with students and parents was assigned great importance; one key aspect of this was ensuring trust between students, parents, and schools. By explaining and categorizing the difficulties as diagnosis- and family-related problems, the initiative partly remained in the hands of school officials. At Seaside School, police reports were part of an overall strategy to build trust between residents in the neighbourhood and official society. A legal discourse emerged in these narratives, although there were also expressions of ambivalence about reporting situations involving students. The school officials argued that accumulated routines, collaboration, and the presence of police in the neighbourhood resulted in school officials moving quickly to involve the police. Thus, as concerns strategies for managing difficult situations involving students, it would seem that problems that were previously categorized and explained as social and educational challenges have gradually been transformed and moved from a pedagogical discourse into a legal discourse.

The apparent entry of a legal discourse into the school through close collaboration with the police may therefore create a situation in which students in schools, such as Seaside School more easily end up with criminal records than do students in schools, such as Park School, where school officials primarily chose parental involvement and dialogue as their strategy. The image of the socially deprived and segregated neighbourhood helps to create a division between different places and the people who inhabit them. This division also legitimizes specific measures and programmes intended to deal with ‘problems’ in disadvantaged areas. Thus, the strategies used at Seaside School run the risk of reproducing already existing patterns in society, where youth growing up in socially disadvantaged areas are more likely to be prosecuted for crimes than middle-class youth are.

Finally, we wish to add some reflections on our main results: When we draw the two schools apart and use them as two poles in our analysis – a school in a socially disadvantaged area and a school in a middle-class neighbourhood – we also get a clear picture of how institutional discourses cut through a polarized social reality. We get a clear picture of how officials at one school rely more on dialogue-based social and pedagogical discourses, while those at the other school tend to speak more in terms of police reports, social instability, and alienation. We are aware that there are real socio-material differences between the schools and the surrounding communities and that these differences influence the methods and approaches used by school officials. However, we wish to claim that the strong polarization between the two schools cannot simply be understood as rational responses to two different social realities.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Swedish Crime Victim Compensation and Support Authority [Dnr 08296/2013].

Notes on contributors

Johannes Lunneblad

Johannes Lunneblad has a PhD in Education and works as an Associate Professor of Education at the Department of Education, Communication and Learning, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. His main research interests are in the field of critical pedagogy, urban education, and multicultural education. E-mail: [email protected]

Thomas Johansson

Thomas Johansson has a PhD in Sociology and is a Professor of Education at the Department of Education, Communication and Learning, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He has written extensively in the field of gender studies, the sociology of the family and youth research. E-mail: [email protected]

Ylva Odenbring

Ylva Odenbring has a PhD in Education and works as an Associate Professor of Education at the Department of Education, Communication and Learning, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her main research interests are in the field of gender studies and social justice in education. E-mail: [email protected]