The purpose of this study is to examine how social workers´ in child protective services, and staff working within Swedens´ National Board of Institutional care institutions, so called SiS (Statens institutionsstyrelse) experience the effect coercive care and coercive measures have on young people placed in SiS-institutions. A vast majority of the youths placed in SiS-institutions, are placed there by coercion. While placed at the institution, the staff working there, has the right to perform coercive measures if necessary. The media in Sweden has reported a number of mistreatment and abuse going on within the institutional walls during recent years. But not much focus is put on the effect of the design of the SiS-instititutions, in terms of the coercive character of the institutional care. With a qualitative approach, this study presents an analysis of empirical data, collected from five semi stuctured interviews, with both social workers, working with placement of youths to SiS-institutions, and staff working in the SiS-institutions. The empirical data has shown that the social workers who works with placing youths at the SiS-institutions, generally don´t believe in institutional care as a concept, and that social workers working with placement to SiS-instiitutions generally are very aware of the negative consequences of placing a young person in an institution. The interviews also showed that the social workers generally don´t see positive results in terms of behavioural changes after the placement. When interviewing staff working in the SiS-institutions about coercive measures, the interviews showed that the staff had a lot of room for action, even though they are often lacking relevant education and experience. This in turn increases the risk of having to perform coercive measures, which both testimonies of youths placed in SiS-institutions, and research have shown has a harmful effect for the youths. The data has been analyzed with theories that touch on the subject of power, and social workers room for action. The main conclusions are that the social workers experience of the effect of coercive care at SiS-institutions, is that it in the majority of the cases has no effect, or the effect of making the youths situation worse. Regarding coercive measures, the empirical data collected from the staff working in SiS-institutions, showed that staff experienced the youths as discouraged from behaving against the rules in the institutions, so that they can avoid being the target of coercive measures. But that coercive measures is also uses as a tool by the staff to set boundaries, and create a trusting relationship between staff and the youths placed in the institutions. Although staff describe coercive measures as somewhat of a tool, it can not be ignored that reasearch, testimonies in the media and empirical data also shows that the youths can feel and behave worse when being the subject of a coercive measure.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:mau-68493 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Jallow, Josefin, Sobczyk, Isabella |
| Publisher | Malmö universitet, Institutionen för socialt arbete (SA) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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