DET FARLIGA BARNET. En kulturteoretisk analys av förslaget om sänkt straffbarhetsålder

Abstract

In January 2026, the Swedish government announced a policy proposal to lower the age of criminal responsibility, suggesting that children could be held criminally liable from the age of 13, with legal measures including the possibility of imprisonment. The proposal was met with extensive criticism from referral bodies such as children’s rights organisations and authorities and has since sparked an ongoing public debate. The main criticism suggests that the proposal does not comply with children’s rights and contradicts the Swedish commitments to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). The government though argues that the current situation is exceptional, and that the measures are proportional in relation to the need for civil protection. In this master’s thesis, I examine the policy proposal and the ongoing debate from a cultural studies perspective, with the aim to consider how discursive practices of affect and emotions work together to construct contemporary views of children and children’s rights in Swedish politics. I consider how the proposal can be understood as a shift in the view on children within the Swedish political discourse, which discourses are present in the debate and how they relate to a children’s rights perspective, the role of emotions and affective politics and the potential consequences of this proposal for the children affected by it. For this study I use Carol Bacchi’s WPR (What’s the Problem Represented to Be?) approach to poststructural policy analysis, alongside a discourse analysis based on the discourse theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, to analyse the policy documents and statements from the referral bodies. In addition to discourse theory, the theoretical framework draws on concepts of affect, emotions and securitization, as well as theories of children’s rights and the social construction and deconstruction of childhood. My findings show that there is an ongoing negotiation of the view on children, in which discursive fights over the meaning of important elements such as maturity and responsibility play a crucial role in defining when and how a child can be held accountable for crimes and when the need for support is considered. This also contributes to the social construction of childhood and the lived effects of particular policy representations. Furthermore, emotions and affective politics can be seen as important catalysts that enable the government to advance a criminal justice policy that challenges established views of children and childhood in Sweden.