Today, school fires, vandalism, graffiti and bullying in school environments are common occurrences in Sweden. As a result, schools are faced with significant tangible and intangible costs for different types of measures, of which surveillance technology is one.

This paper presents a study of newspaper articles mapping the occurrence and representation of surveillance cameras in Swedish schools and the stated arguments for and against such usage.

The results indicate that the use of Surveillance technology has not always been critically appraised or evaluated; discussions about the underlying causes of problems are rare, and the developments seem to be part of a risk discourse in which a wider range of behaviour is criminalized; that young people are represented as risk factors, particularly in socioeconomically segregated areas; and an increased use of surveillance technology is only a limited remedy in what is in actual fact a much more complex societal context.