Confined to Care: Girls’ Gendered Vulnerabilities in Secure Institutions

Abstract

In Denmark, secure care institutions are gender-integrated and accommodate young people with a wide range of psychiatric and social troubles. The large majority of young people are placed here in surrogate custody, and a minority, mostly girls, are placed here in protective care. Based on a qualitative study of gendered practices and experiences in Danish secure care institutions, this article provides insight into how gender and pathology merge to produce vulnerabilities in care. The study finds that while girls are viewed through a lens of pathology, secure care practices largely fail to provide treatment for girls. Drawing on feminist scholarship on penal-welfare responses to women, I argue that institutional practices contribute to the production of disordered selves and the marginalization of girls in secure care. This demonstrates how welfare provision for the most marginalized girls reproduces and reinforces the inequalities that brought them into secure care. The study hereby supplements an emerging scholarship on how gender underpins penal-welfare responses and interventions.

Ethnography of young people in confinement: on subjectivity, positionality and situated ethics in closed space

“…The article draws on two ethnographic studies with young people in confinement conducted in Denmark and Scotland. The first study was conducted in Danish secure institutions to explore gendered practices and experiences of confinement (Henriksen, 2017(Henriksen, , 2018(Henriksen, , 2019. The institutions are gender integrated and girls make up about 10% of the confined young people.…”

“…(Fieldnotes,Study 1) This incidence provided valuable insights for understanding the gendered experiences of being confined in (or researching) a space with a majority of boys and male staff. It also illustrated the gendered vulnerabilities and marginalization that stem from institutional logics favouring masculine traits, practices and interests (Henriksen, 2017).…”

“…Ethnographic studies of youth confinement remain limited, but shed light on important aspects of youth experiences and staff dilemmas in the ambiguous space of providing support for youth considered both at risk and as risk (Henriksen, 2017;Schliehe, 2014;Schliehe and Crowley, 2017;Bengtsson, 2012;Disney, 2015;Enell, 2017;Vogel, 2018). It has been argued that access is often restrained by ethical boards (Myers, 2015) and that time-consuming access procedures make this research particularly difficult to pursue for young scholars (Roesch-Marsch et al, 2012;Watson and van der Meulen, 2019).…”

Temporal Experiences of Confinement: Exploring Young People’s Experiences in Danish Secure Institutions

“…They are rarely referred to as prisons, but are rather framed by a euphemistic language where incapacitation and punishment are guised as protection and care, evident in referring to ‘intensive care units’ (isolation cells), ‘secure institutions’, ‘secure training centres’, ‘protective care’, ‘locked residential care’ or ‘reform schools’. Children’s locked institutions are diverse, and the studies are largely empirical explorations of everyday practices (Inderbitzin, 2005; O’Neill, 2001; Wästerfors, 2011), treatment and the use of cognitive programmes (Cox, 2011; Franzén, 2015; Goodkind, 2009; Rose, 2014) and the production of troubled identities (Bengtsson, 2012a; Henriksen, 2017a; Roesch-Marsh, 2014; Vogel, 2018). While time, timing and temporal experience is touched upon in these studies, it has not been thoroughly analysed or theorized.…”

Youth Experiences of and Views on Un-locked Coercive Placement in Residential Child Care

“…The length of the stay differs among the Nordic countries. In Sweden, the average length of placement in secure residential care in 2016 was three to six months (Vinnerljung et al, 2018), while in Denmark it was two months (Henriksen, 2017). In Norway, as in the other Nordic countries, youths from 13 to 17 years are those most frequently placed in residential care institutions (Bengtsson & Böcker Jacobsen, 2009).…”