Med mannen som norm : En policyanalys av Kriminalvårdens handlingsplan för jämställdhetsintegrering.

Sammanfattning: Gender equality is about everybody’s equal opportunities, rights and obligations, no matter what sex you consider yourself to. From an international perspective, Sweden has come a long way when it comes to gender equality, and this is governed, inter alia, by a variety of laws, regulations, policies and other governing documents. The Prison and Probation Service is a department with a strong overrepresentation of men, although the number of women in recent decades has increased in number, both among correctional officers and clients. The organization is characterized by a distinct macho culture, and women are often seen in all aspects as deviant from the norm. This may lead to a series of consequences, among other things, that female correctional officers are objectified and encountered by resistance from both clients, colleagues and supervisors, and risk assessment tools and some rehabilitation programs are not adapted to women. Even men are adversely affected by the fact that the prevailing macho culture contributes to the fact that male clients are rarely regarded as victims, which almost automatically happens if the perpetrator is a woman. In addition, male correctional officers are more often involved in threatening and / or violent situations than their female colleagues. In order to unravel this, the Swedish Prison and Probation Service has developed a strategy to address the gender equality issues in the organization. Policies are important documents from an analytical perspective, which can provide a useful depiction of how the author perceives a particular problem. However, the problem representation itself can also contribute to create problems and depending on how the problem is presented and represented, there is a risk of not addressing the basic problem without merely continuing to reproduce and confirm the problem that the policy from the beginning was supposed to counteract. The result show, among other things, that stereotype conceptions about men and women affect both employees and clients. Men still constitute a norm within the Prison and Probation Service and work tasks typically performed by male correctional officers are still given higher status than rehabilitation work, which is mostly performed by female correctional officers. Given this, there’s a risk that the lack of gender equality will still continue to be reproduced within the organization, both by clients and employees. It may also lead to the fact that the client-related tasks are being sidelined, despite the fact that the strategy has a distinct client perspective from the beginning to the end.