The Punishable Child in Sweden—The Tidö Agreement from a Children’s Rights Perspective

The discourse that has so far dominated in Sweden, and which has manifested itself in various legislation concerning children who commit crimes, is going to change soon. We argue that this discourse is set to be replaced by one that does not consider the subordinate position of children as a result of their age but rather equates them with adults, thus making invisible the power imbalance between children and adults. In this article, we analyze a political document, the Tidö Agreement, and its articulations on youth criminality. We consider the Tidö Agreement to be an important tool in the process of social change, and we carry out this discussion in connection to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), which became law in Sweden in 2020. By using a discourse theory perspective, we examine the articulations in the Tidö Agreement and discuss how these articulations can reproduce or challenge the current discourses by fixing meaning in certain ways. For instance, the word “child” is ambiguous, and its identity changes depending on how it is positioned in relation to other words in a concrete articulation. In this article, we discuss how this word is used in some contexts but avoided in others, and what consequenses this has.