To bear the responsibility - A Local School Perspective on Schools as Crime Preventive institutions

The public and political concern over shootings and gang related violence in Sweden evokes a political need to propose solutions within the criminal policy field.

Alongside repressive measures, such as more police officers and increased penalties, preventive interventions are frequently advocated in the political debate. The school is commonly highlighted as a key arena for the implementation of such interventions.

This is a reasonable priority, given the large amount of research confirming the links between school failure and crime.

What is lacking in this field of research however, is knowledge of how these preventive objectives and initiatives are received by the actors who are expected to carry out the work in practice.

Teachers and school staff have rarely been given the resources or qualifications for their extended mission to prevent crime. In addition, the school institution has undergone dramatic structural changes in recent decades.

In light of these circumstances, this research project aims to explore how crime prevention initiatives directed towards schools are received, interpreted and practiced by school staff.

The project combines interviews with school staff (teachers, principals and school curators) with observations of crime prevention practices in the school environment. Recipient processes of crime policy initiatives are generally understudied.

Therefore, the project is expected to add to the criminological literature with an in-depth understanding of what happens to school crime preventive objectives when they arrive with the receivers of the initiatives.

An overall ambition of the project is to highlight the neglected perspective of the opportunities of local schools to meet the expectations placed upon them as societies’ most important agents of crime prevention.