This research is a field study analyzing conflict attitudes as possible triggers for the conflicts among the unaccompanied refugee children in the HBV houses in the Småland County, Sweden. In order to do so, this study focuses specifically on the causes of the conflicts among the children and to seek a deeper understanding on how these conflict attitudes were acted upon and became the potential triggers for the conflicts. The role of the staff working in these houses and their knowledge of the children's backgrounds and their views regarding the causes of the violence between the children are also scrutinized. Factors that are examined include the children's backgrounds, entrenched historical ethnic and religious violence in their home country that the children might have inherited their conflict attitudes as the result and still carry with into the new environment, Sweden. Interviews were conducted with both the children and the concerning staff in a number of houses in different cities in the Småland county. Triangulation of sources was also used to discuss the history of conflict regarding the children's country and the required data for both the theoretical as well as methodological approaches.  The study analyzed the results using Johan Galtung's conflict triangle and its components: behavior, attitudes and contradiction focusing specifically on conflict attitudes in relation to the other two components of the triangle. This theoretical approach is valuable in breaking down the issue in order to get a deeper understanding on different angles.  Through interviews with both the unaccompanied children and the concerning staff, this study found that the children do have conflict attitudes and constructed conflict behavior as the result of their previous life in a conflict environment, though there are some other factors that have also played a role and deteriorated the violence between them. The staff’s level of awareness regarding the children's backgrounds, cultural values and sensitivities are considerably inefficient due to their different education majors and lack of proper work experiences with the children coming from the war-torn countries. In some of the conflicts the staff's poor understanding of the children's ethnic and religious violence they inherited from their country have further triggered the conflict among the children. Therefore, there is a need for further in-depth research in future to increase the level of awareness of the Swedish Migration Board, Social Welfare Board, Municipalities and the HBV houses regarding the ethnical and religious violence that the children experienced in their home country.

This thesis explores social workers' perspectives on unaccompanied minors’ mental health and their experiences during their asylum process in Sweden. Conducting in-depth semi-structured interviews and applying stress appraisal and a sense of coherence theories, the thesis sought to understand what experiences and challenges the unaccompanied minors confront during their asylum process. And how that impact their well-being and mental health condition. The results show social workers perceptions, on how the Swedish asylum process produced psychological stress, anxiety, sleep difficulties, lack of abilities to cope with stressful situations, traumas, and behavioral changes for the unaccompanied minors' well-being. As indicated by the researcher, the unaccompanied minors undergoing the asylum procedure are exposed to a low sense of coherence and mental health problems.

Denna c-uppsats syftar att genom kvalitativ metod undersöka hur ensamkommande flyktingbarn upplever sig bli bemötta från Migrationsverket ur ett maktperspektiv. Till grund för denna uppsats ligger fyra intervjuer som analyserats med hjälp av kvalitativ innehållsanalys, tidigare forskning och maktperspektiv. Studiens material utgår från ensamkommande barns tillbakablickande berättelser. Urvalet utgörs av fyra personer som kom som ensamkommande flyktingbarn men som idag är över 18 år och inte bor på Hem för vård eller boende. Resultatet visar att makt förekommer igenom hela asylprocessen. Maktdimensionerna tog sig uttryck i väntrummet, under mötet med Migrationsverket och i väntan på beslutet från Migrationsverket. Bärare av makten var handläggaren vid Migrationsverket, god man, tolk och organisationen. Uppsatsen stämmer till viss del överens med vad befintlig forskning kommit fram till men den indikerar på behov av fortsatt forskning. / Nej

The study presented in this thesis focuses on unaccompanied female minors and their experiences as newly arrived migrants in Sweden. As a group, unaccompanied female minors have until recently been rather invisible in both academic research and media. However, according to previous research on migration and integration, they risk being constructed as ‘others’ both due to their status as unaccompanied minors, being female and in relation to general perceptions of what it means to be Swedish. This study is based on qualitative interviews with 11 girls, 13 to 18 years old, who arrived in Sweden as unaccompanied minors in the period between 2014 and 2017. The interviews were conducted in two phases, with nine months to one year between the first and second phases. Whereas the focus in the first phase was on getting to know the participants, the second phase provided an opportunity to delve deeper into discussions on recurring themes from the first phase. The interviews were transcribed using a denaturalised approach and thematically analysed through an abductive process. The thesis explores the girls’ narratives of everyday experiences and interprets them through a theoretical framework of othering. Without losing sight of the social structures that situates the girls’ experiences, othering is approached as a reciprocal, three-dimensional relationship, focusing on knowledge, values and conduct towards the other. The findings indicate that the girls participating in this study were often seen through the normative perception of an already othered context, and as a consequence, their own voices and agency were disregarded. They were, metaphorically, put in places without speech. However, by engaging a critical perspective on their everyday interactions, the girls were also able to recognise and resist othering by keeping true to their own experiences. The thesis concludes that by exploring the margins between their comfort zones and new contexts the girls engage in an epistemic merging of different horizons, which can be understood as a slow but insistent process of moving out from the place without speech.

This thesis is a qualitative case study that explores the experiences of unaccompanied Afghan asylum seeking minors in Greece – a largely neglected area empirically, in migration-related social science research – despite the fact that migration has been an issue of mounting concern recently. The study sets out to bridge this gap hence, to provide insights of the paths of young people as individuals in their own right, and of the dynamics and processes of their forced migrations. The research contributes to contemporary debates about migration and childhood. The thesis takes a broader approach that highlights the connections across borders and covers the multiple facets of unaccompanied minors’ experiences and feelings; pre-exile, during journeys, and on arrival in Greece. The future plans and motivations of the young respondents are also discussed. Information in relation to young respondent’s experiences, emotions and thoughts was collected in a series of in-depth interviews, focus groups and participatory activities. Data was also gathered by professionals and public figures with the aim to identify how these young people are treated and perceived inside and outside of the reception centres in Greece. The data indicates that these young respondents are deeply and negatively affected by experiences of loss, separation, discrimination, abuse, and long-lasting hardships to be found throughout their histories of movement. Their accounts are renegotiated tales where notions of belonging and identity are shaped along the way, and the boundaries drawn around childhood and adulthood are often fragile and fluid. The events of young people’s movements are reported as having been poignant, rendering them in a continuous, transitional state of existence. This stage ‘in between’, it is argued to be intricately entangled with the prolonged political insecurity which in some instances, extents to the condition of statelessness. The analysis of young respondents’ experiences revealed an overt gap between entitlements which are theoretically attributed to unaccompanied minors, regarding their social, political and legal rights – irrespective of their legal status – and pragmatic barriers to be found on the ground; on the streets, at borders, in detention, in police stations, and in reception centres, these young people are imperilled to the process of dehumanization. This process is understood to be a product of social and political violence implicated in local and transnational contexts. A combination of structural factors and practices has been found to be compounded by inhuman actions such as; the commodification process, the classification process, poverty, stigmatization, institutional racism and the ambiguity of political status. The findings further indicated that young respondents had mixed and distinct feelings of their experiences and responded to the process of dehumanization in very different ways; some developed robust resilient mechanisms along the way and formed important social networks for their survival and others felt powerless, and incapable mentally to lead their lives. The data indicated that the type of care and support varied significantly among the reception centres. There was a spectrum of attitudes towards the presence of the young respondents, showing sympathy and welcoming responses but also prejudice, stereotypes and xenophobia. These appeared at professional, government and public levels. Implications are discussed in relation to the punitive policies and practices that demoralise the rights and needs of the young people, hence potential strategies are suggested for reforming aspects of the child welfare/asylum system. The thesis concludes that these young respondents have a uniquely strong claim to social and political rights that will give them back their lost ‘ordinariness’.

7049 unaccompanied children seeked asylum in Sweden during 2014 and 15% of them were girls. The aim of the study was to highlight unaccompanied girls arriving in Sweden and examine their views on integration and belonging. Interviews were undertaken with five former unaccompanied girls in the age of 18-24 through a qualitative approach. The result was analyzed abductively through Rainer Bauböcks’ (1996) Model of Civil Society, David Morgans’ (2011) concept of Family Practices and through Steven Vertovecs’ (2001) concept of Transnational Social Room. Four out of five respondents described that they felt included in the Swedish society. However, according to Bauböcks’ model, the respondents were rather in the process of becoming integrated, since they did not yet fulfill all criteria for integration. Furthermore, the respondents expressed that education was of high value in order to get a job, get integrated and to become independent. Relationships with significant people was also a strong contributing factor to their sense of belonging. The position in transnational social rooms varied among the respondents.

The language used in newspaper articles affects the way readers internalize issues presented; thus, when negative language is used, readers' perceptions of issues may be influenced negatively. One issue for which language and word choice are particularly important is immigration, and historically, reporters have employed a variety of metaphors while writing about immigration in the United States. During the summer of 2014, there was a noticeable outpouring of newspaper coverage relating to thousands of unaccompanied Central American minors crossing undocumented to the United States. Although undocumented migration from Central American has been a common occurrence for decades, the number of children crossing during this time period was unusual. Through the conceptual frameworks of "othering" and moral geographies, this study uses content analysis to identify terminology and metaphors used in local newspapers close to the U.S.-Mexico border, state-wide coverage along the U.S.-Mexico border, and two national newspapers. Water-related metaphors were the most frequently used type of metaphor. There was no correlation between the perspective of the article toward the migrants and the use of metaphors. Thus, newspaper articles present metaphors as neutral terms, although the connotation of these metaphors may be very negative, implying danger or harm. This demonstrates an underlying contradiction between neutral newspaper coverage of an issue, such as immigration, and charged language, which can lead readers to visualize immigrants as dangers to communities and lifestyles, perpetuating the idea of immigrants as "others" who threaten societal norms, even while reading an article that is not overtly negative.

The thesis explores on the negotiation of agency in experiences of age assessment of former unaccompanied refugee minors who seek asylum in Germany, as well as in their interaction with the situational context. As a combination of narrative and thematic analysis, the study is based on six online semi-structured interviews with young people and two with professionals working in Youth Welfare Offices. By employing the perspective of Emirbayer & Mische (1998), agency takes here the form of a temporal process. As a result of the juxtaposition between aspects embedded in the past: such as the fact of not having identity documents; their knowledge of age; images of childhood; experiences lived in the trajectory to Germany, and the interplay with the time, flexibility, and credibility in the practical implementation, the negotiation of agency at the time of the age assessment ranges between normalization and confusion. The findings contribute to the debate about age assessment in Germany unifying migration and childhood research. Furthermore, it advances with an empirical approach of agency in the sociology of youth.

The aim of the study is to explore the factor that impact the social integration of unaccompaniedminors into Swedish society with a focus on the roles play by a voluntary organization Vän I Umeåin assisting these children who seek refuge in Swedish society. These minors have often beenthrough a lot in attempting to get into the country and those who managed to get in in are facedwith the problems of integrating into a new environment. They face challenges such as languagebarriers, weather conditions that they are not used to, and migration policies that sometimes makeit difficult for them to be accepted into the countries. A qualitative study was made with an in-depth interview conducted with four participants, who have been actively involved in assistingunaccompanied minors for the past 10 years. The results showed that factors such as security,family support, friendship, language acquisition, sporting activities, migration policy, andassimilation are important factors for the social integration of unaccompanied minors into Swedishsociety. Social work intervention is also very important in leading these struggles of assistingunaccompanied minors to get socially integrated into a new society.

In the last decade the Italian authorities have tried to adapt themselves to a united European asylum system, in the European Union, through the adoption of legal reforms, intended to improve the conditions of asylum seekers in Italy. Despite these reforms, asylum seekers and refugee’s living conditions are far from covered. The aim of this study is to explore the different functions of social work in the Italian reception process regarding unaccompanied minors and their implications on the wellbeing of the unaccompanied minors. This study was conducted through several interviews with both social workers, which in some way worked with unaccompanied minors, and the unaccompanied minors themselves. This study shows that social workers emphasize the lack of resources, knowledge and the incompleteness of the asylum laws in Italy. This causes great problems that jeopardize the quality and possibilities of social work. The unaccompanied minors on the other hand emphasized the importance of school and the existence of sports in their life as primary means of integration to the new society. From the social workers accounts it becomes clear that large parts of the Italian migration system needs improvement and that the current laws and regulations are not applied all over Italy due to the lack of economic resources and overall knowledge in the matter, all over the country. Even if there is lot to desire, both workers and minors we have interviewed have expressed that there are many aspects that do work.