In this article we investigate the harmful effects of the 2018 Upper Secondary School Act (the ‘Study Law’) upon young people in Sweden who have sought to regularise their stay with the help of this law. We analyse these harmful impacts as ‘legal violence’: structural and symbolic violence embedded in or intensified by law (Menjívar and Abrego, 2012), in the context of Swedish welfare regulation.

The Study Law was ostensibly enacted to provide a new opportunity for some 7,000 young people, the majority of whom had fled Afghanistan. These young people had sought asylum in Sweden in 2015, but had not had their needs for protection recognised, instead being subjected to exclusionary laws, policies and growing racism. The Study Law substituted the possibility of protection with strict requirements of study, work and conduct, while the social and material support needed to fulfil these requirements largely was withheld.

In our analysis, we draw upon interviews with young people collected as part of a doctoral research project, legal materials, and our own, earlier joint experiences as legal practitioners working with those affected by this law. The legal violence of the Study Law, we argue, has produced individual and social harms, particularly impacting the lives of young people seeking asylum. The law has created a complex and hard-to-navigate, legally-violent regime that, directly and indirectly, has exacerbated hardships and facilitated suffering and even death.