Since the 1970s, a major part of the public health work concerning sexuality is conducted at youth clinics offering services to young people aged 13–23 years old. The project ‘Tolerant, bejakande och jämställd’ has studied two different youth clinics in multicultural suburbs of Stockholm, which has enabled discussions about the specific conditions for the work of the youth clinics in multicultural surroundings.  

However, during the years when the project was conducted, it has become desirable to broaden the perspective and encompass other aspects of the field of health research within social science into the project. Primarily, this involved a greater degree of attention to structural similarities between the ways different forms of marginalisation risk occurring in environments where normative expectations about what is considered a healthy and functional body are common.

Results
A revelation of central significance is that the historical script, which points out problems and solutions in the field of sexual education and sexual health, is remarkably constant. The people who are offered guidance vary over time, as well as the  concrete form of service, but a recurring circumstance is that certain individuals and groups of people are pinpointed as particularly vulnerable and thus especially in need of support. In the globalised and multicultural contemporary Sweden with many migrants, young individuals who are considered to be situated outside traditional ‘Swedishness’ are often assumed to have the greatest need of guidance and various regulative measures concerning habits and lifestyle. Consequently, the normative sexuality that is communicated by the youth clinics as a form of ideal often tends to be in line with ‘Swedish’ ideals.   

The “needing others”, however, should also include those young people who, through their sexuality, place themselves outside the heterosexual norm. These are boys/ young men who entirely refrain from visiting the clinics, as well as young people (of both sexes) who are thought to be involved in sexual risk behaviour, such as having unsafe sex and sex with many partners.

This observation leads to the next major conclusion of the project. In the policy and general guidelines of the youth clinics, it is mentioned that their aim is to have a holistic approach of seeing a person as a whole, paying the same degree of attention to body and mind.  In reality, they focus on the young person as a body, rather than as a complex and composite individual. This is mainly due to the formal decision procedures in which doctors and a medical perspective are given precedence over counsellors and midwives, even though the latter group of professionals usually have a much closer and more personal contact with the young people at the clinics.

Within the work of the clinics, the ‘needing bodies’ are problematised in terms of conceived requirements of protection, self-restraint, marriage and contraception. The dissociated gaze that meets the young person at the clinic – facilitated through bodily oriented issues, medical examinations, sampling and tools occurring as a natural part of the daily work – leads to the third conclusion of the project. The generalised body of a young person is regarded as a sexual body. Through their encounters with the youth clinic, the young people learn to understand their bodies as sexual. They are educated to become sexually responsible beings in accordance with ideals concerning equality, tolerance and self-determination, which are highly motivating and legitimatising factors in the contemporary policies concerning sexual education.

Topics for further research  
Questions of method and material have been of central significance for the scientific reasoning, since the investigation is conducted as ethnographic fieldwork. One of the methods used in the project is shadowing, this means that the principal applicant followed a counsellor in her daily work for a period of three months. On the whole, the shadowing resulted in the required inside perspective; furthermore providing a valuable opportunity for retrospection and feedback of the counsellor’s own work. On the other hand, the method was found to be extremely time-consuming, also involving a high degree of social strain. This is hardly surprising, such a close long-term working relationship between researcher and informant is not commonly allowed time to develop. In this context, the project underlines the necessity of further reflection about possibilities and limitations of ethnographic methods.

Another important research question is the role of objects in the investigated context. Young people of both sexes who visit the youth clinics are met by representatives of various professions, equipped with speculum, white coat and plastic gloves for performing vaginal inspections. Blood, hymens, sperm and various bodily fluids are often central subjects in examinations and dialogues. It is reasonable to consider what impact all this intimate materiality has on the staff and the young people.

Materiality associated with items that may seem insignificant to all outward appearances is of particular interest. The explicit agency of emergency contraceptive pills, condoms and certain female contraceptives (such as contraceptive pills and implants) transcends the unobtrusive exterior of the items. Expressed in different terms, it can be said that the far-reaching effects that these pills and contraception methods have had on the sexual everyday life of people, since the 1960s, stand forth as largely unexplored. Further study of the work of youth clinics in terms of spatiality and materiality is a potential enrichment of health research within social sciences.

International relevance and connections
The project has been presented and discussed at international conferences in Helsingfors (Conference NNHSH, 2014) and in Reykjavik (Bodies in Crisis, 2011), as well as at a seminar about bilingualism in Helsingfors, arranged by the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland (2011).

Furthermore, the principal applicant has participated in ‘Nordiskt nätverk för intimitetsforskning (NNI)’. An initial research symposium was held at Oslo University (2010) on the theme ‘Seksualitet – kulturelle og politiske utfordringer’. A second research symposium was arranged at Umeå University (2011) under the heading ‘Emotioner, affekter och andra intimititeter’.  This second symposium was part of the collaboration within the above-mentioned network. It was granted means from Nordic Research Councils for the Humanities and the Social Sciences (NOS-HS) in order to develop theoretical and methodological ‘exploratory workshops’ within the network. The principal applicant was involved in the planning of the network meeting in May 2012, but could not participate in the meeting itself due to hospitalisation.

Research information outside of the Academia
The project has resulted in three popular science articles. These are ‘Det fria skolvalets spökhistorier’, Opsis Barnkultur, nr 4, 2015, on the theme of class, gender and ethnicity; ‘Vad har kärlek med sex att göra?’, Pedagogiska magasinet. nr 3, 2010, on the theme of love; ‘Den obegripliga svenskheten’, Sverigebilden 2010. Svenska institutets årliga rapport om den internationella Sverigebilden.

Apart from these publications, the project has resulted in a lecture at the Senior University under the title of ‘Betongen. Omstridda platser och identiteter’ (2015). The project has also featured in the TV series ‘Historieätarna’, about the relation to sexuality of the upper classes in the years around 1900.  Further, in the TV programme ‘Sex och sånt’ (UR/SVT, 2011), concerning modern education in sex and relationships. A longer interview about the project was conducted in a Canadian documentary on the theme of sexuality in different countries, ‘Sex autour du monde’ (2010).
 
Main publications and publication strategy
The one most important publication is the article ‘Den läckande ungdomskroppen’ (2016). The study of everyday practice of the youth clinics illuminates conflicts in the aims of the different professionals when they tend to regard the young people from different professional perspectives.  As it has been maintained above, the general structure of the clinics normally entails the precedence of the somatic and medical perspective of the physicians over alternative explanations and suggestions for treatment that may be offered by the other categories of professionals. The analysis particularly emphasises that the knowledge, which ‘leaks’ from the young person’s body, is interpreted and discussed in medical terms, even in the dialogues and treatment of counsellors and midwifes.

The article ‘Den vita käppen. Att se och synas från marginalen’ (together with Simon Ekström, 2015) was at first a deviation from the original focus of the project, which was youth clinics in a multicultural environment. However, the empirical material has provided possibilities of a deeper study of several normative themes that were introduced even as early as in the application for means to support the project. By discussing and placing focus on the disinclination of using the white cane experienced by many blind people, the text problematises the multiplicity of marginalisation processes, to which attention has been paid within intersectional research in other fields.  

Because of serious injury contracted by the principal applicant, including rehabilitation, the project was forced to replace publication in international journals and instead concentrate on less time-consuming publications in Swedish.