Vulnerable Girls and Dangerous Boys

Abstract

The study explores the gendered institutional practices and rationalities applied to young people placed in Danish secure institutions. The study draws on ethnographic research, combining participant observation and interviews to gain insight into professionals’ gendered practices and rationalities, and young people’s experiences of confinement. Drawing on Foucauldian power analytics and post-structuralist feminist theory on subjectivity, the study finds that the disciplining practices are gendered to promote working-class masculinity for boys and normative femininity and (hetero)sexuality for girls, with minorizing effects on some boys and girls. The study provides unique insights from a gender-integrated context for confined young people and supplements scholarship on the gendered logics that underpin interventions operating within the penal–social work nexus.