The right not be exposed to various kind of violence, based on The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) permeates several steering documents for the Swedish education system, namely the: School Act [Skollagen], chapter 1, 5 and 6 (2010:800), Discrimination Act [Diskrimineringslagen] (2008:567), The Swedish Work Environment Act [Arbetsmiljölagen] (1977:1160), The Swedish Penal Code [Brottsbalken] (Ds 1999:36), The Swedish Social Services Act [Socialtjänstlagen] (1980:620), Curriculum [Läroplaner] (Lpfö,11, Lgr-11, Lpf-11), and local documents. Moreover, drawing on UNRC that was incorporated as part of the Swedish legislation in January 2020 children have the right not to be subjected to physical and psychical violence in their everyday life.
Accordingly, this legal Swedish framework has created a legally binding obligation for teachers and educational personal in general to actively work in creating safe educational environments, free from violence. In Sweden the schools’ responsibility to prevent and stop bullying and all kind of discrimination is strongly regulated by both national and international law.
Whereas, statistics of bullying in Sweden appears to have been relatively static in-between 1993-2009 (7-8%) (Swedish National Board of education, 2011:353, p. 40) contemporary studies indicate that the problem of bullying is increasing in Sweden since 2009/10 and the most significant increase can be observed amongst girls in-between 13-15 years of age (The Swedish Public Health Agency (SPHA), 2018, p. 40).
Another recent study based on 112 491 pupils in grade nine and from 1684 schools, piloted by The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (SNCCP) (Frenzel and Westernber, 2018:15), state that four out of ten girls contra five out of ten boys claim that they have been subjected to bullying. The increase of bullying amongst young girls place the spotlights on the gendered dimensions of bullying and encourages more thorough investigation of why these patterns can be noticed today.
At the same time, research (Swearer, Espelage, & Napolitano, 2009; the Swedish National Agency of Education 2011) shows the need to apply more holistic approaches in the formulation and enactment of strategies to protect children from violence.
Drawing on the notion of policy enactment (Ball et. Alt. 2012) , this research sheds light on ways in which national and international legislations against violation are negotiated to protect children from violence. Rather than seeing policies as top down directives they are approached as non-linear and dynamic processes, dependent on context and people’s interpretations. With this as a background, the purpose of the paper is to shed light and discuss the enactment of a Swedish municipal’s anti-bullying model by studying three cases of schools with different level of success in preventing and combating bullying. Particularly gender differences and similarities are acknowledged. Thus, this research aims to answer the following questions:
a) Are there similarities and/or differences in-between the three schools in regard to how they enact the municipal’s anti-bullying plan? If so what kind of similarities and/or differences can be found?
b) Which similarities and/or differences are experienced by the pupils in the selected school with a particular focus on gender?
c) How is the municipal’s anti-bullying plan coded and decoded in the schools’ work with a particular focus on the gendered dimension?
d) How can the different level of success in preventing and combating bullying in the selected schools be explained?
In this research the term bullying involves psychical and/or physical form of repeated violence towards an individual (see Edling, 2016).