Ett demokratiskt och brottsförebyggande arbete

Abstract

An effort for democracy and crime prevention - A study about a municipality’s initiatives aimed at schools in vulnerable areas. The overall purpose of this article is to investigate the role community schools are given to meet what is framed as problems in areas with social challenges. The empirical material has been collected through semi-structured interviews with ten employees. The theoretical framework is inspired by Pierre Bourdieu’s metaphor about the state’s and the public’s right and left hands as two competing forces within the welfare state. The analysis has generated two main constructions of goals in the employees’ talk about the goals of the community schools. Namely, for the community schools to function both as arenas for democracy and as arenas for crime prevention. This leads to a contradiction between efforts to open the school to meet these problems and efforts to shield the school environment from them.