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Budget- och skuldrådgivningen i Sverige präglas av otydlighet och urholkning. Det behövs en tydligare ansvarsfördelning, nationella riktlinjer och ett nationellt kunskapscenter, skriver forskaren Julia Callegari och Gert Johansson, rådgivare, i en debattartikel.

This thesis studies how over-indebted women and men are constructed as clients within the Swedish debt reconstruction system. The aim is to contribute with knowledge about how over-indebted women and men are understood, problematised, and handled in research literature and the debt reconstruction system. The focus is on analysing the client identities that are constructed when over-indebted women and men are described and describe themselves, highlight how these descriptions relate to dominant understandings about over-indebtedness and gender, and consider their implications for the support provided.

The thesis is based on four substudies and the empirical material consists of research literature, focus group interviews and individual interviews with budget- and debt counsellors, documentation, and letters attached to applications for debt reconstruction written by over-indebted women and men. Deriving from a constructionist approach, the study draws on theories about how clienthoods are constructed through language use in human service organisations and how prevailing societal norms and notions condition this process.

The results show that descriptions made by and about over-indebted women and men portray their underlying reasons for the debt problems, ability to manage money, and help-need in a variety of ways. As a consequence, the descriptions are found to contain elements that both challenge and reproduce dominant understandings about over-indebted individuals being financially irresponsible or ignorant. Prevailing conceptions about gender and women and men’s financial skills are found to influence how the individuals responsibility for the debt problems, and capability to solve their financial predicaments, are portrayed. The result show that descriptions made by and about over-indebted women and men thereby construct client identities that are attributed with varying responsibilities and capabilities, shaping how the budget- and debt counsellors approaches the individual and the content of the support provided. The conclusion is that the process of constructing clienthoods in part is conditioned by prevailing societal notions, but also has potential to challenge dominant notions emphasising citizens’ responsibility for creating welfare.

Over-indebtedness has increased in Sweden and other European countries during the past 30 years. It involves great suffering for afflicted individuals and high costs for society, as well as inflicting personal stigma because of their inability to fulfill their moral obligation to pay debts. The aim of the study is to analyse personal letters attached to applications for debt reconstruction as examples of counterstories, paying special attention to the potential for these narratives to provide narrative repair for the applicants, as well as to formulate resistance to master narratives regarding over-indebtedness. The data for the study consists of personal letters accompanying applications for debt reconstruction. Qualitative analyses are made of the three different styles of argumentation that over-indebted persons use in applications for debt reconstruction, negotiation, reimbursement-claiming and confession, using the theoretical framework of counterstories. The results show that negotiation and reimbursement-claiming both have the potential for narrative repair and resistance to the master narrative, while confession does not.

Over-indebtedness has become an increasingly common issue in Europe and a growing concern for social work. In Sweden, budget and debt counsellors are the main actors guiding over-indebted individuals towards financial well-being. This study analyses how budget and debt counsellors rhetorically make sense of and justify their service provision. The research data consist of interviews with thirty-nine counsellors, supported by vignettes. The analysis shows that counsellors make sense of their service by constructing two guiding principles: to promote financial agency, centred on upholding the client’s autonomy and self-determination in solving the debt problems, respectively, to promote financial change, centred on providing the advice, guidance and practical support required to alleviate the client’s debt problems. These two guiding principles construct the client’s capability and responsibility to deal with their debt burden differently and motivate the counsellors to take different courses of action in relation to the client. Counsellors’ sense-making talk can thus be said to both reproduce and challenge predominant policy discourses emphasising citizens’ personal responsibility for creating welfare. The findings are discussed in relation to their implications for social work policy and practice.

In parallel with increasing levels of household over-indebtedness, dominant discourses position debt problems mainly as resulting from financial mismanagement and character failings on the individual level. The ‘fiscal identity’ of over-indebted is thereby constructed in opposition to current ideals of financial competence and rationality. This article seeks to investigate how these dominant discourses interact with notions of gender in the debt-managing institution of Swedish budget and debt counselling. The aim was to examine the fiscal identities that are constructed in budget and debt counsellor’s talk and written documentation about male and female clients, and the implications these constructions may have for the help-giving technologies implemented. The empirical material consists of 11 focus group interviews with budget and debt counsellors and analysis of documentation. The results show that gendered fiscal identities are constructed, with masculinity being associated with financial competence, autonomy and less need of emotional support and femininity with a lack of financial competence and a need for comprehensive counselling contacts. These gendered constructions implicitly motivate different help-giving technologies for women and men, although the counsellors claim that gender does not influence the help they provide. Age and ethnicity are found to affect these gendered constructions to varying degrees. The results are discussed in relation to the ideals that are (re)produced through the construction of these gendered fiscal identities and help-giving technologies and how debt-managing welfare institutions contribute to the making of the indebted woman and man.

In the current economic environment, social workers are increasingly being required to support households that suffer from severe debt burdens. However, previous research has questioned if social workers are sufficiently prepared to meet this emerging form of financial exclusion, especially from a gender perspective. Thus, there is a risk that interventions for indebted households will overlook gender-specific, inequality-generating patterns in the acquisition and management of debts. With this in mind, the aim of this article is to provide an overview of the existing literature related to gender and household debt, in order to enable a development towards gender-aware social work interventions that equally support women and men in creating financially stable lives. The results show that gender dynamics affect how households acquire and manage their debt. These dynamics result in different forms and levels of debt for women and men, unequally divided spheres of responsibility for managing the acquired debt burden and differences in their willingness to seek debt advice. Unequal power relations between men and women and gender-stereotypic expectations are found to be key factors for explaining these results. The results are discussed in relation to practical implications for social policy and social work practice.

Mental health problems among children and youth is positioned as one of the most urgent public health issues in Sweden today. Both research and official reports assert that mental health issues have increased among adolescents, especially girls, during the last decades. The aim of this study is to investigate how changes in childhood and gender discourses has implicated the construction of young people’s mental health as a public problem since the early 1990s up until today. The empirical material consists of documents published by state authorities between 1990 and 1998, and between 2006 and 2017. The results show that the construction of mental health issues among children and youth is characterized by an ideological and gendered shift, promoting different ideals of childhood. In early 1990s, young people’s poor mental health was understood as a result of social inequality, most common among working-class boys with behavioral problems. Today, it is framed as an introvert phenomenon most common among girls, who are depicted as having trouble handling stress and performance-related pressure. In this shift, the child (read boy) is initially framed as a “child of society” in need of support, to later on being defined as a “competent child” (read girl) who has the responsibility to create a good life for herself. In this way, the construction of mental health among children and youths reflects how gender orders are reformulated in the individualized era, where young girls who do not embody neoliberal ideals of independency, flexibility, and female empowerment are framed as mentally fragile and in crisis. Furthermore, the construction shows how current ideas about the child as a competent actor has central implications for today’s understanding of young people’s mental health.

In recent years, political and academic attention has been directed towards gender and over-indebtedness. That gender plays a role in people’s acquisition and management of overwhelming debt is well-established, but few empirical examinations are devoted to how social workers encountering over-indebted women and men consider gender in their everyday practice. This qualitative vignette study analyses how thirty-nine Swedish budget and debt counsellors interpret the needs of over-indebted women and men, and how gender is produced in and through their need interpretations. The analysis identifies five vocabularies that counsellors utilize to interpret over-indebted women’s and men’s needs: vocabularies of activity, strength, incapability, vulnerability and severity. Several of these vocabularies, in turn, build on accounts linking masculinity to capability and independence, and femininity to vulnerability. While the counsellors draw on experiences and beliefs related to gender to perform need interpretations, they simultaneously articulate gender-neutrality as a professional ideal. The findings are discussed in relation to their implications for over-indebted women’s and men’s ability to regain financial stability, and suggestions are made on how to develop gender awareness in the practice of budget- and debt counselling.