Marknadsföring av barn : – En konstruktion av barnens identiteter via Familjehemsbankens annonser

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this study has been to examine the construction of identities that are taking place when Swedish children and teenagers are, according to their local social services, in need of a family home. We have collected and analyzed data in the form of advertisement that is publicly available from the Swedish website Familjehemsbanken.se. It is a kind of marketplace that specializes as a go-between for the local social services in different Swedish municipalities and the presumptive local family homes. The descriptions of the children were looked at through a social constructionism lens where we identified patterns and different themes to which we assigned our own meanings or interpretations, based on the analyzed data and previous research and theories. What we found were broadly categorized into three themes; descriptions that were aiming to sell the kids to prospective buyers (family homes), descriptions that highlighted certain issues or problems that the child needed support with or descriptions that we considered neutral or ambivalent. As we conclude in the study, the descriptions in the last category could also be interpreted as either good or bad, depending on the reader and their own values and life experience. Our results show that even though child auctions (in essence: a form of economic slavery) were abolished in Sweden in 1918, today’s Swedish society are still dealing with socially vulnerable children as they – in practice – are still commodities on a marketplace. The methods and language may have changed, but the end result is still strikingly similar to what happened over a hundred years ago. One of the biggest challenges the authors faced was that it doesn’t exist any previous Swedish research on the subject at hand. We would argue, however, that the marketization of socially vulnerable children is an important issue that should be more deeply and thoroughly researched by further studies on the subject.