Socialstyrelsen (2021) reports that 8300 children and young people in Sweden were placed on a so called HVB during 2020. HVB stands for hem för vård eller boende which in english terms is equal to a home for care or housing. HVB was during 2020 the second most common form of placement for children and adolescents. Socialstyrelsen (2018) reports that social workers working within HVB are responsible for meeting young people's care needs in the form of various treatments. Research done by Mattson (2010) suggests that HVB is a closed environment, which can result in social workers that are active in these care homes become identification objects for the young people who are placed in these care homes.   Treatment staff in HVB homes work with adolescents who are in need of support and help. Social workers are expected to work gender-consciously to meet the individual needs of adolescents. Previous research shows that HVB is a complex environment that requires flexibility on the part of treatment staff and that interventions do not always lead to the best results. Newly graduated social workers are expected to possess knowledge as critical awareness of how gender affects treatment work. We have chosen to investigate how newly graduated social workers who are active in HVB homes reflect about the fact that gender is done in treatment work and how they act with adolescents as gender awareness is part of the newly graduated social workers' education. The results of the study showed that the reflections of newly graduated social workers confirm previous research's explanation that gender is made in the treatment work with adolescents and which in turn affects how the staff's treatment work is designed. The result highlights that norms, stereotypes and gender perceptions that society produces affect the treatment work despite the social workers' gender awareness through education. Through the study, we also see the desire to counteract these gender notions and its ability to influence treatment work but that it is difficult.

This thesis is about a special type of institutional treatment called family-work. It can be described as different ways to involve the families of the youth in their treatment programme. The locus of the study are special treatment homes which provide treatment for youth with serious social and behavioural problems. The study concerns three units at three institutions. The thesis has a qualitative and interpretative approach with using of observations, field studies, combined with interviews and field notes. The study focuses at the pre-conditions for the local "family projects" run by the care workers. With "project" means a process where different actions take place. The Theory of Action concept facilitates the understanding of these types of process and the importance of the internal(subjective) and external(objective) conditions in proportion to the space of action. Several local conditions influenced the pre-requisites for the staff to be able to carry out a "family project" and decide how to realize an intention. Important conditions were commissions given by the social services and the treatment focus at the units. The units are functioned as kinds of overall social "project contexts" with four basic characteristics: the treatment focus and structure, the professionalism and the organisation of the work. The conclusion from the study is that none of the "project contexts" at the three units provided good pre-requisites for family-work. "Family projects", realised by care workers were however professional and seem to have helped both the parents and the young persons, but "the project" were, in total, relatively few. It appeared that a successfully completed "family project" is the last step in a long process in which many different conditions contribute to the destiny of the "project". A clear family focused structured treatment at a unit can provide the employees with good conditions for realising the opportunities they see for working with families.