Den könsneutrala lagen, en verklighet eller myt? En kvalitativ studie av domares konstruktioner av ungas socialt nedbrytande beteende

Abstract: Young girls and boys in Sweden can be ordered to compulsory care by the Administrative court if they are in psychosocially problematic situations. The purpose of our paper was to analyze how the socially destructive behavior of girls and boys was constructed in verdicts made by judges at the Administrative court. With a qualitative textual analysis we analyzed what kind of acts and social situations that were considered socially destructive. We also examined whether there was differences to the construction depending on the gender of the adolescent. Our theoretical point of view was based on gender perspective and social constructionism. The empirical material consisted of 26 court cases from 2013 whereas 13 cases affected boys and 13 cases affected girls in the age of 15 to 20 years. We identified differences and similarities between how the girls and the boys were described and how the norms of masculinity and femininity were reproduced by the judges. The girls were described as defenseless, with no insight and therefore not responsible for their behavior. The boys were described as aggressive, criminal and responsible for their behavior and had insight. We discovered that there was a focus on underlying explanations to why girls behaved the way they did. For the boys the focus was mainly on their behavior and there were no need to look at the context to search for explanations. Our conclusion is that the law is not gender neutral in this case and our findings showed that gender was indeed very relevant in the judges’ construction of socially destructive behavior.