Collective caring: creating safety through interactions between young activist groups and young adults in Sweden

ABSTRACT

Existing research explores safety among young adults as a complex phenomenon in diverse social spaces. Nonetheless, it largely approaches perceptions of unsafety and safety strategies as discrete individual action. In this paper, we show how safety is created through the social interactions between young activist groups and their main target or audience, young adults. Our study aimed to explore how young adults created meanings and actions of safety within their activism. Grounded Theory method was use to collect and analyze qualitative interviews with young adults of ten social change groups located in two medium-size cities in Sweden. To interpret our findings, we drew upon interactionist concepts of shared definitions and joint action [Blumer, Herbert. 1966. “Sociological Implications of the thought of George Herbert Mead.” American Journal of Sociology 71 (5): 535–544]. Shared definitions challenged narrow notions of unsafety by identifying uniform categories and harmful stereotypes as the source of the problem, and thereby locating constraints upon the capacity of different groups of young adults to define situations as (un)safe. Joint action combined an immediate response of moving to where young adults were with an enduring response of being there for young adults. Combined, these constituted an overarching social process of collective caring, which we linked to Isabel Lorey’s [2015. State of Insecurity. London: Verso] concept of practices of caring.

KEYWORDS:

• Activism
• gender
• interactionism
• safety
• social processes
• youth

Introduction

It is not difficult to find reasons to be concerned with the safety of young adults, who in Sweden range in age from early teens to late twenties. Most obvious is that physical and psychological safety enables young adults’ development as persons and as members of society (Lerner, Fisher, and Weinberg 2000; NRCIM 2002). Ensuring young adults’ safety is complicated given their ambiguous standing in between child and adult as well as the lengthy path to adulthood. Teenagers remain dependent upon adult members of society, who are accorded physical, emotional and legal independence (Moore 2017; Moore and McArthur 2017). Dependence upon adults continues after teen years, as the process of completing education, entering the labor force, and building a family has prolonged up to ten years for younger generations (Arnett 2000; Dennison 2016; Oinonen 2003). Then again, young adults are highly segregated from non-familial adults through socially separate institutions (Call et al. 2002). Even though young adulthood is considered a period of growing personal autonomy, it remains circumscribed by enduring adult authority. This tension makes ensuring the safety of young adults highly complex, and suggests the need for wide approaches in policy and research.

Yet, for several decades, approaches to safety in research and policy have focused narrowly on individual perceptions of imminent danger in public spaces, such as streets, squares and parks. With their inception in the 1980s, crime surveys found that while women and older people were more likely to report feeling afraid in public spaces, men and young adults were more likely to report experiencing victimization (Lee 2007). Researchers and policymakers dismissed women and older people’s fears as irrational because survey data showed that these did not correspond to actual experiences of victimization (Cops 2010). Initially, the main critique of this narrow approach came from feminist researchers who brought gender and other power relations into analyses (Pain 2000; Whitzman 2007). Women’s fear of violence in public spaces, studies showed, stemmed from exposure to subtler forms of routine victimization across various social spaces (Gilcrist et al. 1998; Kelly 1987; Stanko 1990). Feminist research further demonstrated how women’s fear and vulnerability and men’s fearlessness and chivalry in public spaces were tied to normative femininities and masculinities (Cops and Pleysier 2011; Sandberg and Tollefson 2010).

More recently, a critique of narrow approaches to fear and safety appears to come from research on young adults. Similar to feminist research, this field examines how young adults perceive unsafety and develop strategies of safety not limited to public spaces but across diverse social spaces. Social spaces can be understood as places where different social relations and interactions are considered suitable, such as home, school, nightlife and online (Lefebvre 2009; Simmel 1950). Nonetheless, existing research largely approaches young adults’ safety as discrete individual action. This is problematic for two reasons. One, it misses the implicit social interactions through which young adults’ create meanings and actions of safety. Two, it risks reinforcing broader tendencies towards individualization through which safety is being recast as private, personal responsibility rather than a public, social issue. Activism offers young adults the possibility to influence safety initiatives yet remains underexplored in the literature.

In this paper, we present a study that aimed to explore how young adults’ activist groups created meanings and actions of safety. We wanted to understand how civil society groups approached the issue of safety as part of a larger project that is examining the safety work of municipal governments in Sweden. We used Grounded Theory method to collect and analyze qualitative interviews with young adults from ten social change groups located in two medium-size cities in Sweden (approximately 100,000 inhabitants). Safety, we found, was created through implicit social interactions between the young activist groups and young adults who were the main target or audience of their explicit activist strategies. In the next section, we discuss previous research on young adults’ safety. Then, we present our theoretical framework based on interactionist concepts followed by the methods and materials used in our study. We subsequently present our empirical analysis, which we discuss in light of previous research and theory. In the final section of the paper, we discuss how our overarching concept of collective caring relates to Isabel Lorey’s (2015) concept, practices of caring.

Previous studies of safety among young adults

In reviewing the literature, we found that previous studies had explored how young adults’ perceived unsafety and developed strategies of safety across diverse social spaces. We therefore organize our discussion here according to these spaces. As with the broader research on fear and violence, studies of youth safety are concerned with public spaces, in part because young adults are expected to exercise greater mobility and use of these spaces compared to children (Johansson, Laflamme, and Eliasson 2012; Söderström 2011). Cockburn (2008) found that, in a low-income urban area in the United Kingdom, young adults made use of city streets and parks because they had no other place to go, yet they perceived these as unsafe. Young adults did not feel welcomed in public spaces, they felt they were seen as a threat or prey, and they faced harassment from adults (Cockburn 2008). Young women and men faced different gender-based forms of harassment but their strategies for safety contested gender norms by drawing upon everyday routines, social ties and a sense of neighborhood belonging (Cockburn 2008). In a low-income urban neighborhood in Cape Town, young teens sought to assert their independence in public spaces while simultaneously relying upon adults for protection (Parkes 2007). Their safety strategies consisted of avoidance, escape, risk-taking, and even helplessness. In contrast to the young adults in Cockburn’s (2008) study, their strategies were gender normative: boys negotiated an authoritative or tough masculinity, and girls turned almost exclusively to a femininity of caring for others and domesticity (Parkes 2007). Such gender differences towards unsafety might be a means for young adults to distinguish themselves from children, Johansson, Laflamme, and Eliasson (2012) argue. In their study among middle-class teens in Sweden, girls and boys enacted gender differences to categorize threats faced in public spaces as adolescents, but not as children. For example, adolescent boys were afraid of all-male gangs and girls were afraid of lone adult male rapists.

In contemporary narratives, young adults are themselves expected and encouraged to display dangerous behaviors, especially with regard to the social spaces of nightlife and partying, as Seamana and Ikegwuonu (2011) argue. They found that young adults in Glasgow combined limit-pushing behavior, specifically excessive drinking, with creating attachments and deepening friendships. Fileborn (2016a), in turn, captured how young adults in Melbourne handled other youths’ limit pushing behavior when attending pubs and clubs. Young adults attempted to control their external environment and maintain bodily autonomy, and they chose familiar venues where people were similar to themselves. Their strategies were gender normative in that these were designed to protect women who were seen as always vulnerable to danger and to assign men the role of women’s protector (Fileborn 2016a).

Institutions such as schools and after-school programs, are social spaces created purposively for young adults and therefore should ensure their safety. Yet, Moore (2017) found in his study of Australian institutions that young adults and children perceived safety as constrained by their less powerful position relative to adults, who were able to decide over them. Young adults lacked knowledge and experience on sensitive topics but found adults unwilling to discuss such topics in ways that would enhance their safety. Safety, from young adults and children’s perspectives, was a set of feelings built upon trusting relationships and familiarity as well as order and orderliness (Moore and McArthur 2017). Similarly, Finnish students from seventh to ninth grades understood safety in school in terms of social ties, such as feeling welcomed and appreciated, able to make one’s own decisions, and feeling belonging among peers (Syrjäläinen et al. 2015). They felt unsafe when adults failed to react in the face of violence and bullying. Yet, the cause of unsafety in school was perceived as stemming from those who were ‘different’ and safety strategies emphasized ‘familiarity, ordinariness and homogeneity as well as supervision and security’ (Syrjäläinen et al. 2015, 69).

Digital platforms are social spaces where young adults appear to have greater autonomy in handling unsafety, as evidenced by the peer-centered approaches found in a study among high-school students in Catalonia. Students perceived unsafety as the protection of privacy and intimacy online whereas adults were concerned with young adults’ exposure to harmful and illegal content (Poblet et al. 2017). Their respective strategies for safety diverged as well: while adults wanted young adults to report and denounce harmful content to authorities, young adults fostered a self-reflexive relationship within the digital ecosystem by maintaining their connection to others and preserving their personal autonomy (Poblet et al. 2017).

Activism are final social spaces addressed by previous research on young adults’ safety. In Canada and the U.S., Fetner et al. (2012) found that high school students created Gay and Straight Alliances as a safe space from violence, harassment, discomfort, and social exclusion resulting from heteronormativity and gender norms. Nonetheless, to create this safe space, Gay and Straight Alliances were more likely to include straight people while excluding Trans and people of color (Fetner et al. 2012). The authors concluded that students’ strategies of increasing awareness, educating others and raising funds were less effective than pursuing institutional or policy change.

In contrast to the predominant research on fear and safety, research on young adults’ safety is not limited to individual perceptions of imminent danger in public spaces. Instead, it demonstrates how young adults’ perceive unsafety and develop safety strategies as inextricably linked to social ties and the quality of relationships within various social spaces. While at times, young adults reproduce normative prescriptions of safety according to gender, age and class, at other times they resist prescribed norms, including by developing their own definitions. Nonetheless, despite attention to relational accounts of safety (e.g. Fileborn 2016b), current scholarship largely approaches perceptions of unsafety and safety strategies as discrete individual action. As such, knowledge of the implicit social interactions through which young adults’ construct meanings and actions of safety is limited. Of the various social spaces, activism likely offers young adults the greatest possibilities to forge new meanings and actions of safety, yet it remains underexplored.

Conceptualizing safety as a social process

We drew upon an interactionist perspective to interpret our findings because, in contrast to both individual actor and social structure perspectives, it offers concepts for exploring the social interactions through which meanings and actions of safety are constructed (Blumer 1966). Moreover, an interactionist perspective permitted interpreting implicit meanings and actions in contrast to collective action/social movement theories that focus on explicit ones.

According to this perspective, human action develops through social interactions whereby people interpret the meaning of one another’s actions and define how each is to act (Mead 1934). Human action is understood as joint action or ‘the articulation of the acts of participants’ where people do things together without each person taking the same line of action (Blumer 1966, 540). Joint action even occurs among collectivities, such as the young adults’ social change groups in our study and those through which they interact with other young adults, such as schools and after-school centers. Common or shared definition form the basis of joint action: participants ‘build up their lines of action and fit them together through the dual process of designation and interpretation’ (Blumer 1966, 18). A shared definition is created continuously through participants conveying interpretations to themselves and one another (Blumer 1966). Joint action gains consistency as participants act according to its shared definition, thus taking the form of a trajectory or process.

Contrary to common assumptions that interactionism is unable to account for power and inequality, this perspectives offers an alternative approach for doing so. Blumer writes (1969, 19) ‘It is the social process in group life that creates and upholds the rules, not the rules that create and uphold group life.’ Power is generated and maintained through an on-going social process of collective negotiation within face-to-face encounters and interpersonal relationships (Hall 1985; Ridgeway and Kricheli-Katz 2013; Thye and Kalkhoff 2014). Power is understood as the capacity ‘to define the situation and establish shared definitions of reality’ (Thye and Kalkhoff 2014, 33). The creation and reproduction of inequalities, such as those based on age and gender, occurs through joint action whereby people construct shared definitions that legitimate, accommodate and contest how power is used, by whom and for who. People are empowered and restricted in defining a given situation not only by immediate face-to-face interactions but also by the actions or potential actions of others outside the situation (Schwalbe et al. 2000).

Shared definitions pertain to all aspects of social life, including emotions. They function as feeling rules to direct when, where and how actors feel and display emotions in a given situation (Hochschild 1979). Safety is often understood as an emotion. For example, in secondary schools, students are expected to feel and display feeling safe. Yet, acts of harassment, threats or violence occur among schoolmates and adults. In this situation, students face a contradiction between feeling and displaying safety according to shared definitions, and feeling endangered in response to potential victimization. To deal with this contradiction, students might manage their emotions by covering up their fear of or exposure to victimization to avoid shame for not being able to feel safe in this situation. This is referred to as emotion management, which goes hand and hand with conditioning emotional subjectivities to constitute central processes for reproducing inequality (Schwalbe et al. 2000). How emotions are managed helps to sustain, acquiesce or destabilize meanings of power and inequality (Fields, Copp, and Kleinman 2006; Schwalbe et al. 2000).

While much of joint action is consistent, uniform and routine, it is always open to the possibility of ambiguity, creativity and change (Blumer 1969). This is because the trajectory of joint action and share definitions are always contingent upon performance (Blumer 1969). Activists groups in particular are in a favorably position to forge new joint action and shared definitions through their collective action strategies; they might even challenge feeling rules and the processes reproducing inequality (Hochschild 1979). Coe and Schnabel (2011, 668) propose the term ‘orquestrating emotions’ to refer to ‘activists’ ability to balance even contradictory expectations [regarding feeling and displaying emotions] and to actively transform these into a greater whole that works in their favor.’

The framework outlined here provides key concepts for analyzing the social interactions through which young adults’ construct meanings and actions of safety within activism. First, it turns attention to the joint action into which the discrete lines of action among young adults’ activist groups ‘fit and merge’ (Blumer 1966, 541). Second, it focuses on the shared definitions created to guide their joint action as well as the constraints faced in doing so. Third, it sheds light on how young adults’ activist groups negotiate their capacity to define what safety is, including in relation to feeling rules and emotion management. Finally, it locates how young adults’ activist groups reproduce established definitions of safety but also potentially disrupt these by putting forth alternative definitions and asserting new emotional subjectivities (Schwalbe et al. 2000).

Methods and materials

Grounded theory method was selected because it permitted openness to explore how young adults’ created meanings and actions of safety within their activism as well as abstraction to formulate concepts based on the data (Charmaz 2014). These aspects align with Blumer’s (1969) methodological approach for the empirical study of human interaction. Indeed, Charmaz (2014) proposes Symbolic Interactionism and Grounded Theory method as a suitable theory-method package. Following Charmaz (2014), we understand the materials as co-constructed between participants and ourselves, while acknowledging our role in analyzing these materials on a more abstract level.

The study was conducted in two cities located away from the metropoles of southern Sweden, and therefore less visible in debates about safety. We purposively sought activist groups that identified as young adults and were oriented towards social change issues, such as young women’s empowerment, children’s welfare, alcohol and drug-free lifestyles, integration of newly arrived immigrants and LGBTQ identities. In Sweden, these groups pertain to a well-established, mainstream voluntary sector. Contact information was identified initially through Internet searches and personal networks. Chain referral sampling was then used to obtain subsequent contact information, whereby each group contacted was asked to help us contact other groups. Our final sample included five groups in each city, or ten groups in total, across four types: formal youth civic associations linked to national organizations, informal grassroots associations, high school-based groups, and municipal initiatives (i.e. youth councils).

With each group, a single in-depth interview was conducted with one to three key activists/group leaders, for a total of twenty-four participants, twelve per city. Participants were between eighteen and thirty years old. Interviews began with asking participants to describe in their own words their group’s social change efforts, including explicit objectives, strategies and activities. Thereafter, they were asked to discuss how they understood safety according to their own interpretations of this term. Finally, participants were asked to reflect upon how they saw their group’s social change efforts as contributing to safety according to their own interpretations, if at all. Our sample and data collection procedure followed Blumer’s (1969, 41) methodological approach for the empirical study of human interaction by consisting of well-informed observers in the sphere of young adults’ activism and qualitative (group) interviewing respectively.

Before each interview, participants were informed about the research project, the main purpose and content of the interview, and the intended use the information generated from it. These same topics were covered in a letter given to each participant. Participants gave oral consent to participate in the interview. In order to maintain participants’ identity confidential, we refer to the settings as City A and City B and we use generic pseudonyms for activist group names in the presentation of the results.

The interviews were transcribed verbatim and imported into MAXQDA software program for analysis. Beginning with open coding, we studied every line of written data comparatively and labeled each line/segment with a word(s) that reflected ideas identified in the data (Charmaz 2014). The gerund (‘-ing’) form was used to code for action. Open codes were sorted into clusters by grouping together those that related to one another, and each group was studied and named. In focused coding, these preliminary categories were used to re-examine all open codes, compare them with one another, and discard irrelevant codes. In theoretical coding, the connections between categories were examined and synthesized into a whole. As emerging theoretical categories clarified what was going on, data collection and analysis was ended. The step of re-constructing theory is presented in the next section.

Meanings and actions of safety within young adults’ activist strategies in Sweden

Through our analysis, we constructed three categories: challenging narrow understandings of unsafety, moving to where young adults are, and being there for young adults. See Figure 1.

Figure 1. Visual model of the findings.

We interpreted the first category as shared definitions of unsafety, and the second and third categories as joint action to address unsafety guided by shared definitions (Blumer 1966, 1969). Both shared definitions and joint action of unsafety were created through the implicit social interactions between the young activists groups and the young adults toward whom their explicit activist strategies were directed. Together, these categories interlinked to form the overarching social process of collective caring, which we found aligned most closely with Isabel Lorey’s (2015) concept, practices of caring.

Challenging narrow understandings of unsafety

The shared definitions entailed a critique of narrow understandings of unsafety as imminent danger or threat, which our informants argued, focused on symptoms rather than the source of the problem. As an alternative, the shared definitions provided a complex interpretation of unsafety as comprised of three features: facing pressure to fit norms of uniformity, dealing with harmful stereotypes, and experiencing unsafety across social spaces.

According to the young activists, young adults experienced unsafety through facing pressure to fit norms of uniformity or sameness. Current norms they spoke about included having to be online, meeting an appearance standard, performing well academically and/or in sports, and going out at night and using alcohol. The young activists described differences in the norms youth should fit based on core social categories, with gender being a main one. A member of the girl-only Pixie Center in City A explained the pressures girls faced in school from both teachers and classmates:

Demands involve how you have to look, how you have to behave – you are not supposed to be too quiet but not too rowdy, and not bad academically, and if you wear the wrong clothes, then you are bullied because of that.

Members recounted that they joined the Pixie Center because they could take space without having to act or look in a certain way, in contrast to mixed spaces in which boys were encouraged to take space by acting unruly, and girls felt sidelined.

From the young activists’ perspectives, risk of, or exposure to, danger occurred in relation to the pressure to fit norms of uniformity. Even if verbal and physical threats and abuse from other youth or adults were experienced individually, these originated from inequalities based on social categories. Gender norms denoted that young men feel and act brave in the face of physical violence and young women feel and act so afraid of sexual violence that it had become an everyday routine, as the following dialogue between two members of the Young Women’s Empowerment Center in City B exemplifies:

Respondent A: It is a given that we have to be afraid in public, that we cannot even think in the form of “What? I don’t need to be afraid when I am in public” or “Could I deserve this because I think I am a good person?” (…) For so long, we have negotiated away our own limits of what we deserve … 

Respondent B: Exactly … it is impossible to disconnect unsafety from the built-in fear, everyday fear that we talk with young women about: yes, threats and violence … it is so deeply built-in that one does not even think about it. When I bicycle home from here in daylight, I always go through the woods, but when it is dark outside, I do not. It is not a choice I take but rather natural, and I do not even think about it, I just do it.

According to the young activists, another way in which young adults experienced unsafety was through dealing with harmful stereotypes. Informants were highly aware that dealing with stereotypes was not simply something they or others close to them went through individually: it had to do with wider attitudes in society that affected entire categories of young adults, women, migrants, and queer people. ‘Stereotypes are very easy to create but most are narrow portrayals of how refugees might be,’ explained a member of the Red Cross Youth Association City A. Despite Sweden’s policies promoting gender equality and diversity, the young activists argued that their practical application fell short in part due to people being comfortable within their own social circles but also to labels such as ‘migrant’, ‘women’, and ‘queer’ carrying negative and devaluing meanings.

Many have this image of people who come to Sweden. Then, a distinction emerges where people who have grown up here do not talk with unaccompanied migrant youth. When they grow up, they see migrants as scary and do not dare go to certain places. But, it has to do with getting to know one another, and then one realizes that it is all right with those persons. Member of the Youth Council’s Tolerance Committee in City A.

Lastly, from the young activists’ viewpoint, young adults experienced unsafety across a range of social spaces, including school, afterschool centers, home, online, public spaces and even with themselves: ‘It depends on where one is. Out in the city center, it is well-lit and a lot of people, but many youth feel unsafe at school’ portrayed a member of Youth for Safety in City A. The first two features of unsafety – facing pressure to fit norms nor dealing with harmful stereotypes – could occur in various social spaces:

Young adults can feel unsafe everywhere. School is not the best right now in Sweden, there is a lot of unsafety, and then the internet is another place where one can feel unsafe, because there [aggression] can be more anonymous. Youth also have other traditions or customs that are not accepted by their family. Member of the Red Cross Youth Association in City B.

Differences were highlighted between youth who were relatively integrated into society and refugee youth living in temporary housing settlements or even in hiding, because the latter implied unique circumstances for experiencing unsafety:

Especially in the different refugee settlements, people do not know whether they are going to be sent home or when an interview is going to be or not, what is going to happen, yes, it is not easy. Member of the Friends of Migrants Youth Group Network in City B.

The shared definitions above were created through the interactions between the young activist groups in our study and the young adults toward whom their explicit activist strategies were directed. Such interactions allowed the young activist groups to gain crucial insights into how young adults understood and experienced unsafety, and to be empowered to use these insights as a basis for re-defining unsafety on their behalf. Their shared definitions not only critiqued narrow approaches to unsafety focused on imminent danger, but also offered a broader approach to unsafety encompassing diverse social spaces, similar to that found in previous research on young adults’ safety (Cockburn 2008; Fetner et al. 2012; Moore 2017; Poblet et al. 2017; Syrjäläinen et al. 2015). Yet, whereas previous research focused on individual perceptions of unsafety in relation to normative social categories, the young activist groups in our study developed a shared critique of such normative categories, as a member of the Youth Sobriety Association in City B conveyed:

Respondent: Safety is central to work with, that one is able to be oneself in a place where one feels safe and accepted. Where it is an open environment and open climate, and no one is excluded in the ways one otherwise is.

Interview: How can one be excluded otherwise?

Respondent: It can be different sexual preferences, gender identities, and so forth, generally speaking, society is not very accepting.

In contrast to Syrjäläinen et al.’s (2015) study in which teenagers saw individuals or groups who were ‘different’ as creating unsafety, the young activist groups in our study saw exclusion from homogenous normative categories, such as adult, white, heterosexual, and male, as creating unsafety. Exclusion constrained the ability of non-normative categories of young adults, such as vulnerable youth, young women, migrant youth, and queer youth to define situations as safe or unsafe (Schwalbe et al. 2000; Thye and Kalkhoff 2014). The young activist groups depicted the emotion management that certain categories of young adults did to handle unsafety or safety in spaces where they were expected to feel safe or vice versa, as well as the gendered feeling rules guiding this management (Hochschild 1979). Their shared definitions highlighted the conditioning emotional subjectivities that young adults faced with regard to unsafety, following Schwalbe et al. (2000). In this way, unsafety was constructed through negotiations of power (Thye and Kalkhoff 2014).

Joint action in response to unsafety

Joint action, guided by the shared definitions above, addressed unsafety in both immediate and enduring ways.

Moving to where young adults are

To address young adults’ unsafety in an immediate way, young activist groups described moving themselves and their activities to the different social spaces where young adults were, including schools, after-school centers, nightlife, public spaces and even online. This joint action consisted of integrating safety into group goals, developing people-centered activities, and standing up for what they believed.

Informants described integrating the goal of safety into their respective group goals. ‘We work so that youth can feel safer; we do our best for that’ member of Youth for Safety; and ‘Safety is extremely important for us; it is something we work for; it is one of our hallmark issues’ member of the Red Cross Youth Association, both in City A. While the young activist groups were working on different social change issues, they were part of a longstanding voluntary sector in Sweden aimed at improving social conditions among the disadvantaged or marginalized. Surprisingly, the young activists had infused into these longstanding volunteer groups their own new goals of questioning social norms that privileged homogenous social categories according to gender, ethnicity, and sexual identity. The young activists directly related these group goals to what they understood as needed to address unsafety: those who did not fit into to normative groups and faced harmful stereotypes were unsafe, as described by the following dialogue with two members of the Young Women’s Empowerment Center in City A.

Respondent 1: We primarily provide support to people who define themselves as young women by giving them information on gender equality and issues that we think are important.

Interviewer: And what types of issues are important for you?

Respondent 2: For example, that young women feel safe, that they know that they can contact some place if needed, if they need someone to talk to about gender questions, LGBTQ issues.

A second feature of the immediate response to unsafety was developing people-centered activities. People-centered activities were oriented to the needs and preferences of other young adults, especially vulnerable youth, young women, migrants, and queer youth. A member of the Friends of Migrants Youth Group Network in City B described how they developed their activities:

Many young adults wanted to participate so there was a need to share responsibility in order for everyone to do the activities of their interests. I began with outdoor activities but then found that we could have a baking group and then a study circle … the only thing needed for an activity is initiative, engagement, there is no demand.

People-centered activities included both fun leisure events, such as alcohol-free film nights or hikes for newly arrived migrants and long-term Swedish residents as well as serious undertakings, such as support groups or networks for lonely youth, young women around sexual violence or undocumented refugees. Activities were tailored to be available where and when young adults needed, in person and electronically, in school corridors or after-school centers, and during school recess or on weekends and holidays.

A final feature of young activists’ immediate response to unsafety was standing up for what they believed. Activities were oriented not only to help specific categories of young adults but also to raise awareness among young adults overall. They did this by speaking out about topics and developing public debates, for instance, on migration policy or LGTBQ issues. As the following dialogue with a high school LGBTQ group in City A described:

Respondent: I feel respected by a lot of classmate who are like, “Wow, he dares to stand up for who he is”. It is encouraging. Otherwise, one does not know how to act and stays quiet.

Interviewer: But the first time you all spoke out, were you scared?

Respondent: No, we felt that we were well prepared about what we wanted to say. We knew what we wanted to say and what we wanted to get out of it.

The joint action developed to respond immediately to unsafety tied into the young activists’ commitment to service and issues. The young activists were driven by strong principles and being engaged allow them to stand up for what they believed, as a member of the No One is Illegal Network in City B conveyed:

I want to have a world without borders rather than challenge migration policies – that is a good goal, but I want to go the whole way. I feel that when I am engaged with other people who also dare to dream about that world, there is so much energy in that vision.

A member of the Red Cross Youth Association in City B echoed this notion: ‘Simply that everyone has the right to prosper and receive help. That is why I am here; I want to contribute to that’.

Being there for young adults

To address young adults’ unsafety in an enduring way, young activist groups described being there for young adults. According to informants, changing safety in society involved not only helping young adults immediately but also transforming the relationships among them: ‘Safety can be about leaving me in peace but it can also be about hang on to me tight when I need it. We create safety through relationships,’ explained a member of the Young Women’s Empowerment Center in City B. Relationships that foster safety have to be created, as the following quote from No One is Illegal in City B illustrates, ‘One cannot just say to people to trust one another and be kind to each other, rather it is necessary to create the contact between them.’

This entailed creating a sense of belonging among young adults by providing them with companionship, listening to their concerns, and putting oneself in their shoes:

With groups of unaccompanied refugee children, we get together and get to know them, with the goal that they feel welcome, learn the language and help them to feel that this is their home. Member of the Tolerance Committee, Youth Council in City A.

Being there for young adults at times required diffusing tense situations, preventing violence, and confronting norms, but these were complementary:

It is not necessary for an incident to happen for us to help. It may be enough that we walk around the school corridor and listen to someone who wants to talk, and say, “go ahead, you can do that, I will listen.” Member of Youth for Safety in City A.

Another member of this same group explained, ‘I want to be a little extra eye to see that no one is hurt, in the best way we can, that is how I hope we contribute to safety for them.’

Being there for young adults further entailed embracing difference in order to close the distance between people, as the following quote from Friends of Migrants Youth Group in City B clarified:

Respect is very important, to respect that we are different and not try to say that we are all alike or that we all have to do as the Swedes do, no. Just understand why other people do something in a certain way and not in another way, and accept that, that we do things differently and have different backgrounds and opinions, but we can also be friends.

This took the form of improving interactions and exchanges between people as well as creating safe, accepting and fun spaces:

It is a safe and open space where everyone is welcome and there is no demand anywhere upon people, except that you decline drugs, no other demand for you. I feel very welcome to be here. Member of the Youth Sobriety Association in City B

Guided by the shared definitions above, the young activist groups in our study developed actions to address unsafety through implicit social interactions with other young adults to whom they targeted explicit activist strategies. Even though none of the groups coordinated their explicit strategies with each other, actions to address unsafety merged and fit together (Blumer 1966, 1969). This joint action contrasted with individual safety strategies found by some previous studies that were guided by established shared definitions (e.g. Fileborn 2016; Parkes 2007). Instead, this joint action likened the safety strategies found by Cockburn (2008) and Poblet et al. (2017) in which young adults drew upon social ties, fostered quality relationships and tied into a sense of belonging – in their neighborhood and digital spaces respectively. Our findings went beyond these existing studies by capturing how young activist groups developed a coordinated response that was both immediate and enduring. The immediate response was similar to Fetner et al.’s (2012) study where Gay-Straight Alliances created spaces safe from violence, harassment, discomfort, and social exclusion. Their study falls short of capturing an enduring response among the high school alliances. The enduring response in our study entailed transforming relationships among acquaintances and even strangers by both providing concrete affective support to young adults as well as embracing difference.

The joint action here challenged power and inequality by enhancing the ability of certain categories of young adults to define situations as unsafe or safe (Schwalbe et al. 2000; Thye and Kalkhoff 2014). It further resisted the emotion management expected of young adults in relation to feeling rules, including gendered ones (Hochschild 1979; Schwalbe et al. 2000). For example, joint action affirmed that boys could feel vulnerable and girls did not have to be, and that both girls and boys could take care of others, even strangers, without being devalued (Hochschild 1979). The focus on transforming relationships contested established shared definitions of young adulthood as characterized by a dichotomous tension between personal autonomy and adult authority. In this sense, joint action re-shaped the conditioning emotional subjectivities not only for participants in young activist groups but also for other young adults, that is, their broader constituency (Coe and Schnabel 2011; Schwalbe et al. 2000).

While the young activist groups in our study were part of longstanding volunteer sector in the Swedish context, the joint action suggested a more radical response to safety by contesting the shortcomings of social welfare policies as well as the equality and diversity policies in Sweden. This especially in the context of the scaling back of state interventions and increased emphasis on individual self-responsibility. The young activist groups interpreted this situation as a gap that both joint action and activist strategies helped fill:

It feels as though this network is needed, like there is a gap somewhere else, I do not know whether something is not working in the municipality or somewhere else, but that voluntary engagement is needed indicates that something higher up is missing. Member of Friends of Migrants Youth Group in City B.

Conclusions: collective caring

Our analysis above shows how safety was created through implicit social interactions between the young activist groups and the young adults who made up their main audience, that is, embedded within explicit activist strategies. Meanings and actions of safety differed markedly from those established by adult researchers and policymakers, including out own. Unsafety was understood as a social issue that required coordinated actions in the form of both an immediate and enduring response. This social process of collective caring not only fills a gap in the individual approaches to studying young adults’ safety but also offers an alternative perspective to the individualization of safety more broadly in society and politics. Most notably missing among our informants’ accounts as well as previous studies is attention to safety among racialized and disabled young adults, which suggests crucial lines for future research.

In the final step of Grounded Theory method, we linked our concept of collective caring to existing theory and found that it best fit with Lorey’s (2015) concept practices of caring. In her analysis of contemporary practices of governing the precarious, presented in State of Insecurity (2015), Lorey argues that precariousness is an existential state that designates what constitutes life in general for all humans. Despite efforts to create safety, it is impossible for anyone to be protected from precariousness; there is no life where we are not in a precarious state. In Lorey’s words: ‘All security retains the precarious; all protection and all care maintain vulnerability; nothing guarantees invulnerability’ (2015, 20). Lorey further argues that precarity can be understood as an effect of the political and legal regulations that are specifically directed towards protecting us against this same precarity. In other words, the practices of promoting safety are also producing the problem of safety that these measures address.

Following the ontological logic of precariousness as well as the analytical logic of practices, the practices of safety that the young activist groups in this study perform can be interpreted as practices of caring, and these practices address (or produce) unsafety as a problem of lack of collective care. Especially the joint action of moving to where young adults are and being there for young adults are practices that illustrate how working for safety becomes a practice of caring. In her study, Lorey (2015, 91) illustrates this with a group of feminist activists in Madrid, Precaritas al la deriva; ‘Their central political and social strategy consists in enhancing the status of care’. The Precaritas focuses on the practice of being among women, meeting women and developing their practices with the women they meet, but with no search for a common identity. Rather, there is an ambition of finding common notions among the women they meet, focusing on the common boundaries and possibilities that different bodies have.

Although the young activist groups in our study did not depict departing only from their own experiences of precariousness to the same extent as the Precaritas, their practices are similar, as is their ambition to embrace differences between the young adults they meet. Indeed, the young activist groups in our study gained a broader understanding of experiences f precariousness through interactions with diverse young adults who they targeted. Thus, our results shed light on a mentality of striving for safety, i.e. safety becomes a form of lived practice that could be described as ‘a logic of care’ in the words of Lorey (2015, 94). Accordingly, we believe that there is a fundamental potential in the practices of safety captured by our empirical analysis for transforming safety initiatives into democratic initiatives. If the main problem of safety work is to practice care, this could be regarded as both a critique of society as ‘careless’ as well as a potential practice of how care could be included in future democratic practices.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation under Grant 2012.0211 for the project ‘Fear and Safety in Policy and Practice: Overcoming Paradoxes in Local Planning’ managed by the Umeå Center for Gender Studies. We are grateful to our collaborators Linda Sandberg, Chris Hudson and Jennie Brandén as well as three anonymous reviewers from CJYS for their comments on an earlier version.

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author, AC. The data are not publicly available due to restrictions e.g. their containing information that could compromise the privacy of research participants.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Anna-Britt Coe http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1975-9060

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation under Grant 2012.0211 for the project ‘Fear and Safety in Policy and Practice: Overcoming Paradoxes in Local Planning’ managed by the Umeå Center for Gender Studies. We are grateful to our collaborators Linda Sandberg, Chris Hudson and Jennie Brandén as well as three anonymous reviewers from CJYS for their comments on an earlier version.