Research project To bear the responsibility – A local school perspective on schools as crime preventive institutions

The aim of this project is to explore how crime prevention initiatives directed towards schools are received, interpreted and practiced by local school actors. The school is commonly highlighted as society's most important arena for crime prevention. At the same time the Swedish school system has undergone dramatic structural changes in recent decades which have made the school's compensatory mission more difficult. Research on the development of crime preventive initiatives has emphasized an individualization of social crime prevention during the last decades. Among other things, it has been raised that the ideas behind such initiatives have been dominated by the tendency to place a great deal of responsibility for crime prevention on individual members of society. In this project, teachers, principals and school staff will be understood as such individuals, being directly or indirectly ascribed the responsibility to prevent crime. Interviews with local school actors combined with observations of crime prevention practices in two upper secondary schools in Stockholm will be conducted. The intended contribution of this research project is to gain a deeper understanding of how local school actors experience their opportunities to meet the expectations placed upon them as societies most important agents of crime prevention.