A Study about Ethnicity, Gender, Boys and Young Men in Institutional Care

Abstract

The project investigate how ethnicity and gender is constructed in the care and treatment at youth detention homes. Central questions are about how the institution staff understand the enrolled boys and themselves in relation to ethnicity and gender and how that understanding is given importance in the organization of the institutions, their practices and attitudes. This is investigated with participant observations and interviews at four detentions homes for boys in the age of 13-21. The aim is to analyse how ethnicity and gender is given significance and materialize in practice through the institution staff actions, reflections and definitions of the social world. The study has a critical understanding of ethnicity, that will say ethnic relations are understood as products of power relations. Ethnicity is under this an instrument for sorting people that results in differential identities, exclusionary practices, different and unequal conditions. The study also builds on feminist research indicating that gender has a central position i constructing ethnicity. This approach emphasizes that neither ethnicity or any other dimension of social relations can be analysed as something pre-given, it problematizes rather how constructions of different relationships/categories also implies an attitude in relation to each other.

Keywords

Ethnicity, Gender, Intersectionality, Masculinity, Youth Detention Home

Publications

Report will be published in spring 2012