The aim of this article is to explore how place and physical space are perceived by girls and young women living in two neighbourhoods marked as marginalized and how they orientate in urban spaces and their everyday lives. Data were collected through teller-focused, walk-along and photo-elicitation interviews with twenty-one 13- to 22-year-old girls and young women in racially diverse neighbourhoods in two Swedish cities and analysed using queer phenomenology and conceptions of space. Three themes emerge: orientations in everyday life, place as the Other, and belonging and the contestation of space. The girls’ and young women’s everyday life movements are understood as voluntary and forced into different directions in urban spaces. They orientate in spaces where class and racial boundaries divide people and places, as the local neighbourhoods and inhabitants are stigmatized as the Other. However, these boundaries are contested by the girls taking pride in where they live, their Muslim identity and forward orientations in life.

Neighbourhoods that are populated by a racially diverse working-class and by society marginalized are places often associated with violence and crime; phenomenon intimately intertwined with masculinity. Less is known about the lives of girls in these areas. Rooted in an intersectional perspective, using Sara Ahmed’s concept of ‘girling’, together with theories on doing gender, this article aims to explore what meaning gender plays in girls and young women’s narratives of growing up in racially diverse and marginalized neighbourhoods in Sweden. Thematic analysis was used to analyse 21 interviews with girls and young women aged 13–22 years old. The results show how be(coming) a girl in these neighbourhoods entails having their bodily lives circumscribed by the way they are being addressed as girls, and being restricted in their movements. Regardless of this, the girls claim it is easier being a girl than a boy, although this comes with the price of self-restraining, occupying normative femininity as a necessary way of direction towards a pursued future. Resistance, then, is rather directed against discriminatory spatial expectations, than specifically gendered restrictions, at the same time as such expectations always intersect space, gender and race.

Formal social control of girls has historically focused on disciplining their sexual behavior, and studies show this is still present. This article analyses how authorities describe and give meaning to young people’s sexual behavior when assessing their need of compulsory care. The results show that in the few cases when boys’ sexual behavior is highlighted, it concerns sexual delinquency. The assessments of girls’ sexual behavior largely regards situations where they are exposed to others’ sexual transgressions, risking to victim-blame girls. This is discussed in relation to gendered understandings of sexual behavior and supposed gaps in legislation.

In most Western societies, there are metropolitan neighbourhoods defined as deprived. In the public eye, not least through media reports, descriptions of these areas often revolve around violence and crime, creating a common understanding of these areas as violent and dangerous places, consequently inhabited by violent and dangerous people. At the same time, these are also neighbourhoods where people carry on their everyday lives, a perspective seldom highlighted. Further, this one-sided depiction of deprived areas tends to put boys and young men in focus, excluding girls and young women. In this chapter, we set out to map and discuss research on the meaning of place in the lives of girls in deprived areas. In doing so, we hope to contribute to a more complex and nuanced understanding of what it is like for girls growing up in deprived neighbourhoods today.

This article reviews and compares the use of confinement and other restrictive measures against young people under 18 in child welfare and/or the criminal justice systems in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway. Young people are confined for a variety of reasons, including protection, care, treatment, and punishment. However, confinement of young people is a contested issue because it can be viewed as necessary but also potentially harmful. Comparison of legislation and practices reveals that while there are some similarities in the service provisions for young people, there are also significant disparities among the four countries regarding the organization, function, and frequency of the use of confinement and restrictive measures. While Denmark and Sweden use secure welfare institutions, Finland and Norway apply other restrictive measures. Despite the differences in approaches to confinement in the Nordic countries, the use of confinement is guided by the principle of the child’s best interest, and the child welfare system is the main frame for confinement and intervention. The article discusses these disparate practices from the perspective of children’s rights and identifies new avenues for research and practice. © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Historically, the regulation of girls through institutionalization has been guided by bourgeois norms of femininity, including virtue, domesticity, and motherhood. Using a Foucauldian perspective on the production of subjects in Swedish secure care, I investigate whether or not middle-class norms of femininity, centered today around self-regulation, still guide the regulation of working-class girls. By analyzing data from an ethnographic study, I show that even though secure care is repressive, it is also permeated with the aim of producing self-regulating subjects corresponding with discourses on ideal girlhood. However, since working-class girls are rarely made intelligible within such discourses, thereby making the position of self-regulatory subject inaccessible, the care system leaves them to shoulder the responsibility for resolving a situation that is shaped by structures beyond their control.

In discussion of troubled adolescent girls, their mental health often is in focus and a discourse constructing girls as vulnerable victims therefore dominates Swedish social services and secure care. This article is an investigation of how the girls themselves are navigating the discursive terrain where understandings of troubled adolescent girls in secure care are regulated. The results show that even though the girls' stories show considerable similarities with what is previously known about troubled adolescent girls, their understandings of their lived experiences differ. The girls resist the dominating discourses that view them as victims by emphasizing their autonomy and own responsibility. However, in trying to distance themselves from devaluing interpretations, they take an attitude that ultimately obstructs their possibilities of getting help, since it inevitably puts them in opposition to the care system.