Parenthood is a normatively regulated category with distinctly loaded moral expectations about "good parenting". These normative expectations are lived through the body in gendered, classed and ethnicized ways. We examine the ways in which parents representing majority and minority ethnic backgrounds construct an image of themselves as respectable parents; a construct that is intertwined with the idea of decent citizenship. The parents drew on middle-class, professional and familist discourses on assertive parenthood, characterized by close scrutiny of their children's activities and friends, and the clear boundaries imposed on them together with democratic, dialogical relationships with them, as the preferred way of parenting. Describing one's own parenthood as respectable included an implicit or explicit definition of "Others", who were less respectable as parents in ways that carried gendered, ethnicized and classed meanings. The qualities required of "a respectable parent", besides physical and material characteristics, were also connected with the idea of "inner fitness" in the form of the right kind of moral values.

Availability and access have been central worries that are discussed related to children's and young people's sport and other structured leisure activities. In this article, we shift the focus towards children's and young people's experiences of violence perpetrated by coaches or leaders within such activities in Finland. We use a large-scale survey on children's and young people's experiences of violence in different spheres of life (Finnish Child Victim Survey 2013) as the data, and concentrate on the significance of gender and ethnicity for the experiences of violence within structured leisure. The results show that boys report significantly higher levels of emotional, physical and sexual violence perpetrated by a coach or a leader within leisure activities than girls; and immigrant background seems also to increase the risk of being victimized. With the help of logistic regression analysis, we assess the role of other background factors in experiencing violence within structured activities, but conclude that the significance of gender and ethnicity persists even when factors related to the family background are taken into consideration.

Problem-oriented public discourses about families with an immigrant background shape the ways in which these families are seen in society, as well as the social positions it is possible for them to aspire to. Drawing on an interview data, this article focuses on how family members with an immigrant background navigate their way through problem-centred discourses when speaking about their own family life. The article suggests that the construct of 'a respectable family' acts as a way to counter the stereotypes and to claim a more valued position in society, and it can be found in both idealized descriptions on one's own family and conflict narratives.

In this article, we examine young people's narratives on sexual harassment on how it is endured, objected, observed, and negotiated in diverse everyday life environments. The article is based on an analysis of thematic interviews with 36 young people aged 15–19 living in the metropolitan area of Helsinki, Finland. Altogether 23 young women and 13 young men participated in the interviews which were conducted at educational institutions as individual, paired or group interviews. We analyze young people's narratives on sexual harassment as stories of everyday citizenship and, and more precisely, as acts of citizenship. We have also applied the concept of respectability to study how young women and men construct respectable sexual citizenship. We found out that whereas female respectability suggests that young women should be able to protect their sexual integrity effectively, male respectability expects young men to effectively balance between different positions of masculinity. While young people widely condemn sexual harassment and recognize it as discrimination, the gendered ways of constructing respectability, however, maintain the moral double standard by which young women remain the gatekeepers of sexual consent and young men test its boundaries.

This article focuses on girlhood in one of the youth subcultures of rural Sweden, EPA greasers. The EPA, a car that Swedes aged 15 and older can legally drive, is at the centre of EPA culture. In this uniquely and previously male Swedish youth greaser culture, there has been a recent increase in the number of Swedish girls driving EPAs. Previous research has shown how EPA culture and EPA girlhood are shaped through distancing from hegemonic urban and middle-class norms and ideology. In this article, we seek to develop an understanding of EPA culture, specifically the ways in which it has been adopted by girls. Starting out from their online performances, we will explore how place, femininity and resistance intersect. The findings demonstrate how EPA girls use a playful way of troubling norms in their online performances, understood here as space and outlet to resist and mess around with dominant discourses and prejudice. This can also be understood as a way of talking back to masculinity, the majority society and urbanity.