LVU – med rätt att vårda? : Ett diskursanalytiskt fokus på vårdnadshavare, barnperspektiv och socialnämnd

Sammanfattning: Authors: Petter Englund and Oscar Stenström Title: LVU - with a licence to care? A discourse analytic focus on custodians, children's perspective and social authorities [Translated title] Supervisor: Eva Palmblad Assessor: Anders Östnäs The focus of this paper was to study how the parents/caretakers and best interest of the child were portrayed and constructed in LVU (The Care of Young Persons [Special Provisions] Act) court judgments. Further we aimed to study how social authorities were positioned by the court in these judgments. This study was made with a qualitative approach. Thirteen different written judgments from the administrative court in Sweden were studied. We analysed our results using tools from the constructivist tradition. More precisely a critical discourse analysis inspired by Michel Foucault and Norman Fairclough. Language, and the ways of using it, plays a great part in the discourse tradition of analysis. This was reflected in how the judgments were written, and in how they portrayed caretakers and interests of the child. The study found that the court, in great length, focuses on the parents' problematic behaviour such as addiction, violence and lack of attention towards the child. The use of children's perspectives, however, varied greatly between judgments. Given the current position of children's perspective in Sweden, this discrepancy was subject to further focus. Social authorities were positioned in a somewhat standardized manner by the court, this surprised us to some degree. Keywords: best interest of the child, compulsory care, discourse, social services, LVU.