In Sweden, school staff are legally responsible to report concern for a child’s welfare to social services. This obligation can be regarded as a cornerstone of social protection for children exposed to various forms of domestic violence, including honour-based violence (HBV). However, research indicates a tendency to underreport suspicion of child neglect by occupational groups in countries that apply mandatory reporting laws. This article examines the questions: How do school staff reason on their legal responsibilities in relation to reporting children and young people with a migrant background who are exposed to, or suspected victims of, HBV? What specific dilemmas can be identified in such situations? The study is based on qualitative interviews with school staff, particularly school counsellors, and a qualitative thematic analysis has been conducted. The results indicate that HBV is a complex field for professionals to handle and often becomes a subject of negotiation in relation to mandatory reporting. School staff commonly express a lack of trust in the social services’ knowledge or possibility to support children or young people in honour-based contexts. The respondents also reason around the notion that a report might lead to a worsened situation for the young person and increased control from the family. This all together shows an uncertainty or an internal moral conflict on the reporting obligation among school staff. © 2023 The Author(s). 

Många unga har upplevt sexuellt våld eller varit utsatta för olika risker under och efter migrationen till Sverige. Det kan exempelvis handla om barnäktenskap, att sälja sex för sin överlevnad, om människohandel, hedersrelaterat våld eller våldtäkt. I Att möta sexuell utsatthet beskriver författarna professionellas möten med nyanlända barn och unga som har erfarenhet av sexuellt våld. Hur bör professionella i Sverige bemöta och hantera de ungas berättelser? Hur ska de agera när de möter barn som är gifta? På vilket sätt kan skolan vara ett stöd? Hur bör samverkan ske mellan olika professionella grupper? Boken riktar sig till studenter inom socialt arbete, omvårdnad och folkhälsa men kan också läsas av professionella som möter unga nyanlända inom olika verksamheter.

I detta kapitel har vi, med hjälp av tidigare forskning, utvärderingsstudier och rapporter, sammanställt och diskuterat kunskapen om insatser i det våldspreventiva arbetet mot hedersrelaterat våld och förtryck med fokus på utövare och potentiella utövare av våldet. Det handlar om våldspreventiva insatser som riktar sig till unga i skolan och på fritiden och som ofta genomförs av civila aktörer, samt stöd- och behandlingsinsatser inom socialtjänst och Kriminalvården när våldet är ett faktum.

Social work practice is characterized by contradictions, such as support versus control and the fact that social interventions usually aim at individual change, while clients to a greater extent request practical support and social security. At the same time, social work practice is characterized by status hierarchies and professionals seem to have an adversarial relation to providing practical support. The aim of this study is to gain a deeper understanding of status hierarchies in school social work through analysis of how school counselors’ reason about their role and task working with newly arrived young migrants.

The study is based on qualitative interviews with 15 school counselors. The interviews have been analyzed using a qualitative thematic analysis.  

The study shows that the school counselors work with newly arrived minors is perceived as quite practically oriented. The school counselors describe that they spend a considerable amount of time helping with practical issues such as finances and translate letters from authorities. This kind of practically oriented tasks are referred to in previous research as "professional dirt work" and ends up far down in the status hierarchy.  These tasks are not perceived as uncontroversial and are subject to negotiation. Among the school counselors in the study there is both an outspoken desire that someone else should be responsible for this work to make time for more important counselor tasks, but there are also those who perceive this work as an important part of school social work that underpins the relationships with the pupils.

In 2021, the Swedish government tasked the National Agency for Education with strengthening schools' systematic efforts to combat honour-related violence and oppression (HRV). The initiative included awareness-raising activities and support for teachers and other staff in pre-school, primary and secondary schools. In addition, the school's responsibility to address HRV has been reinforced in the new curriculum (Lgr 22). The overall aim of two consecutive research projects was to explore the ways in which honour-related vulnerability can manifest itself in the school environment and the potential for school social work to identify and prevent this specific type of violence, as well as to collaborate with social services in addressing the concerns of young people living in an honourrelated context. The studies are based on interviews with school social workers and other school staff in 15 secondary and primary schools in 10 different municipalities.The overall findings show that all interviewees have encountered young people living in a context of honour, ranging from everyday control to violence or threats of violence from individuals within their networks. Concerns were raised about addressing HRV in education because of the risk of creating conflict in the classroom and reinforcing stereotypical values among young people. One approach to overcoming this is to teach about human rights and children's rights in general. The school social worker plays a key role in supporting young people living in an honour context, but building trusting relationships requires a long-term effort. There are concerns that reporting to social services may damage the relationships and there is lack of trust for social services' knowledge of HRV. In conclusion, there is a contradiction between the idea of human equality and the recognition of differences, which school staff perceive as creating challenging dilemmas when dealing with HRV.

Role perceptions of journalists are no global monolithic professional features, but, as has been demonstrated by previous research, cultural differences between journalists operating in different countries are pronounced. These journalistic role perceptions form the central focal point of this study while zooming in on a highly debated news topic that has been covered intensely during the past few years: the so-called refugee situation. Our study uniquely combines survey results (N = 1267) with qualitative in-depth interview data (N = 30) collected among French- and Flemish-speaking journalists in Belgium as among Swedish journalists who have been reporting frequently on refugees. By exploring the challenges journalists experience while reporting on refugees, our results show that although in survey questions journalists from different regional origins express different role orientations, journalists from all covered regions express going through a similar process of negotiating their roles when reporting on refugees. The normative ideals of journalists can be strongly influenced by the concrete topic being reported on. Reporting on refugees follows its own logic. Journalists who report on refugees try to give concrete meaning to principles of both objectivity and empathy. © 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

För unga som växer upp med hedersrelaterat våld och förtryck, precis som för unga som utsätts för andra former av våld i hemmet, kan skolan stå för trygghet och vuxna i skolan kan vara avgörande för dem som behöver söka stöd för sin situation. Skolpersonalens möjligheter att identifiera elever som kan behöva stöd från samhällets sida är en del av det som ofta benämns för skolans sociala uppdrag. Skolkuratorn är den profession som har ett övergripande ansvar för det psykosociala stödet till elever, vilket innefattar såväl hälsofrämjande och förebyggande arbete som åtgärdande insatser. Skolkuratorn är således en nyckelperson när det kommer till att identifiera och stödja barn och unga som lever med hedersrelaterade normer och begränsningar. Syftet med det här kapitlet är att, utifrån skolkuratorers egna erfarenheter, beskriva och diskutera hur hedersrelaterat våld och förtryck kan komma till uttryck i grund- och gymnasieskolan samt skolkuratorernas handlingsutrymme när det kommer till att identifiera och stödja unga i en utsatt situation.

The school social worker has an important role in the support of young people in vulnerable situations. Counselling is central to their professional practice, not least when working with young migrants, a group where trauma and experiences of violence may be part of their life story and migration process. The purpose of the study is to increase the understanding of counseling as a tool for school social workers in the professional meeting with young migrants. The empirical data include qualitative interviews with 15 school social workers who meet this group daily. The interviews have been analysed using a qualitative thematic analysis. The findings show that the delimitation of which counseling lies within the school social worker’s responsibility is not clear. The fact that school social workers experience that other parts of the welfare system are often unavailable to young migrants forces them to go beyond what they describe as part of their professional responsibility and provide therapeutic counselling. The school social worker uses different tools and methods in their counseling and mixes them based on their own area of interest, education, and experience. The study concludes that the accessibility that newly arrived young migrants have with the school counselor creates a role where they are the “only” professional available to offer support and counseling. This means that the school social workers need to go outside their professional domain. The school social workers discretion in relation to the type of counseling and how it is conducted appears to be unlimited. © 2024 Författarna, Licens: CC-BY 4.0.

The purpose of this article is to deepen our understanding of integration and exclusion of unaccompanied minors, by using a phenomenological, affective framework on their experiences and feelings. The article is based on qualitative interviews with 36 young people who came to two northern rural municipalities in Sweden without guardians during 2015. The interview situation raised questions about our research position, which is reflected upon in an autobiographical note. The study shows that various forms of loneliness and feelings of exclusion are a consistent theme in the young people's life stories. The loneliness often appears as situational and connected to the migration experience and the initial reception in the recipient country. The interviews also contain voices of great loss, but also concern, in relation to the family of origin. Sometimes a distrust of the interview situation could be discerned, where the young people's lives made a strong impression, and loneliness was embodied. The results open for questioning a medicalization of social and existential needs, but also of the problematic nature of a traditional researcher role in this context.