Sara Uhnoo

• University of Gothenburg

Why do legal professionals mention their sons when discussing a new consent‐based rape law? Drawing on feminist legal studies and sociology of emotions, this article investigates a discourse of male fear of rape accusations among Swedish legal professionals and how defence lawyers strategically employ it. The analysis shows that a male fear defence...

After years of feminist struggle, international conventions, and the #MeToo movement, consent-based rape laws have rapidly been replacing coercion-based laws across Europe since 2017. In May 2023, we identified 20 European consent-based rape laws, and more were in progress. This article analyses the emergence and convergence of these laws, drawing...

Research access in ethnographic studies “involves gaining permission to conduct research in a particular social setting” (Shaffir and Stebbins in B.W. Shaffir and R.A. Stebbins (eds.) Experience fieldwork. An inside view of qualitative research, Sage, London, 1991, 25). Following laws about public transparency, courts are normally open to the publi...

Private companies often actively engage in disaster response. In recent years, disaster resilience, including public–private partnerships, has been identified as an ideational cornerstone of crisis management policy. This study offers insights into how these international policy trends in disaster management manifest in practice. Based on an empiri...

Discretion is of major interest in research on professions. This article focuses on professionals’ discretionary reasoning about collaboration with spontaneous volunteers. By applying theories on discretion and institutional logics and drawing on disaster management research, we analyse interviews with fire and rescue service professionals involved...

Authorities always need help in disaster situations, and in line with the current trend of community resilience, they see support from active citizens as a promising solution. However, the uncontrolled inflow of spontaneous volunteers and other resources into a disaster area poses serious dilemmas for professional responders. The uniqueness of this...

Young people regulate their own and one another’s behaviour through sets of subtle and informal rules regarding conflicts, violence, and fighting. The environment in which they most often experience different degrees of physical violence and threats thereof is that of the school. This chapter examines the way Swedish young people approach and deal...

Citizen involvement in policing is a means to enhance public confidence in the police and their legitimacy, and to increase their effectiveness. However, governmental control over voluntary policing is fraught with difficulty. We study the relationship between police and citizen volunteers in partnerships, looking specifically at roles and responsi...

Firesetting is one of the crime acts most representative of youth crime, and schools are among the buildings most often targeted, causing significant social, material and economic damage. This study examines schools as arenas with particular exposure to deliberate firesetting and as actors interpreting and utilizing their organizational scope to pr...

Criminology has an incomplete and imprecise understanding of the qualitative aspects of juvenile co-offending. This article explores one type of juvenile crime, namely arson. Using publicly available judicial records, it analyses 60 cases of fire-setting in Sweden in which there were two or more perpetrators aged under 21 acting jointly. The result...

This article examines why, and under what circumstances, young people illegally set fire to schools. Utilizing court and police records from cases of illegal firesetting in Swedish schools where offenders were aged 21 or younger, a number of crime scene and offender characteristics are compiled and analysed using correspondence analysis. First, fou...

Deliberately set school fires cause significant economic, material, and social damage to society. This article aims to contribute to a sociological understanding and explanation of school fires set by juveniles and to the development of effective prevention strategies based on the results obtained. The study draws upon comprehensive empirical data...

This article draws upon two separate studies on policing in Sweden, both investigating “ethnic diversity” as a discourse and a practice in the performance of policing functions: one interview study with minority police officers from a county police authority and one ethnographic study of private security officers. To examine how “diversity policing...

This paper explores a controversial side of police culture: the use of ethnicized humour among the police. The empirical material consists of twenty-two interviews made in context of an assessment on the work environment for ethnic minority officers and civilians within a major Swedish police force. The qualitative analysis illustrates how officers...

How can discriminatory treatment along perceived ethnic lines become reproduced within a discursive climate that claims to support ethnic diversity and condemn racism? Through an analysis of interviews with 21 current and former employees of the Swedish Police who identified their background as ‘foreign’, this article investigates how certain langu...

Loyalty is commonly regarded as a virtue, by many social theoristsas a lost virtue in an increasingly individualized world. We argue thatloyalty is not altogether lost, rather loyalty is institutionally demandedand enforced in certain working life enclaves, amongst others, the policeforce. In these enclaves, demands for total commitment and exclusi...

In this article we interrogate how ethnicity interfaces with the police culture in a major Swedish police force. While addressing administrative levels, in particular police security officers’ screening of new recruits, we focus on the role that loyalty plays in defining how ethnicity interacts with mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion in the stru...