Policing the school: In between dialogues and crime reports

The actions and behaviour among students in Swedish schools previously described as teasing, fighting and ‘school trouble’ have gradually come to be positioned and understood within a legal discourse. Self-assessment surveys conducted with students in grade nine, from 1995 onwards, do not, however, reveal any marked increase in violence among young people over time. Consequently, it is possible to identify signification spirals, where certain issues of concern are identified, certain groups of people are targeted, and the issues are gradually multiplied and linked together, leading to an escalation of the threat and a call for firm steps of action. The purpose of the present study was to investigate how different professional groups – school health teams and police officers – related to and understood various measures taken to handle school violence. The authors focused in particular on the increasing tendency to report crimes in schools and the consequences of this trend. The results indicated, on the one hand, an ambivalent attitude towards filing police reports on the part of school health teams. On the other hand, the police officers were highly critical of the reluctance among school health teams to report ‘crimes’ to the police